I realize this looks more like Mordor than a church tower, I hope I can fix that later, but before that, gotta rewrite my Edge to Arcs function because its not always return clean topology!

I might feature creep and add a mill and some farm stuff. The hardest part is finding the right reference, Moulin de la Tour seems like a good one en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moulin_...

back at my project again. Now building the fundation for the bell towers. No wonder old architects were so obsessed with binary distributions, it make for very compelling way to subdivide for support beams. both aesthetically as well as practically

finished another part of the cathedral. Also added a bunch of gizmos for modifying the building. I have been doing so much procedural modeling these days, it feels like the geometry just appears as I think of it. Feels nice!

The front part of the second cathedral building is done. I am wondering if for the huge front windows I should allow 2 to the power 4 tilings.

Extermly simple but very useful geometry node tips. If you have unconnected cruves in one geo and you want to get the tips of each spline, use points of curve to mark points that are on open end.

A very unsual industrial use of Blenders Geometry node. Made a little node tree for a friend to measure the volume of heaps of materials they bring in the facotry. Scan with the app, Blender takes care of the rest. Nodes here> github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

Since alot of logic is the same, finishing second part of the cathedral is going rather fast. It still feels like WWIII will come before I can finish this project 😒 Nodes here: github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

A puzzle for @PuzzlingPlaces we almost made, which we decided against at the end because the back face of mont saint michel was too dark! I have covered the day night technique here though: medium.com/@shahriyarsh...

With this I have the first building type I need for the cathedral compeleted. With all the functions I already have in place, hopefully the rest will go faster.

Geo node tip! extremly simple trick for getting equal distanced subdividion

Added some fun stuff like irregurality to the windows, and hooked it up to my building. I am almost done with one of the 4 building types I have planned for the cathedral

Added a little cenetral control paramters with drivers to switch between day and night. Moody stuff

ok got the procedural fractal patterns with curves and a cleaning meshing in geo nodes to work! There is a point of mathing where it becomes magic to you too. I hope I dont have to ever touch this function again 😂😂

I have a decent setup to get the fractal paterns with binary tree intervals in geo nodes. But getting this to line up properly and meshing it is goin to be a real damn pain. I am slowly thinking of precomputing the meshing in a collection I sample

I thought in the eye of the modern law my fiduciary duty as a director is above all else. For profit companies operate to maximize profit. This is a good book by John Kay. Turns out neither in the statute laws nor court rulings is that straight forward.

Got the begining of the windowed walls! Gothic windows are unfortunatly (who even came up with this ****) fractal, so I havent figured out how to best do the patterns on the windows themselves! Nodes here: github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

speaking of me being an idiot. Not just scaling around pivot, but I was making all my extrudes edge by edge to generate patterns. Scale Element nodes allows you to very easily model in complex shapes! The whole indent pattern is this one repeat zone

Made good progress on the facade! Geo nodes here: github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

again no booleans, just pure procedural modeling in geometry nodes. I show the nodes at the end of the video

god I am an idiot. Geoemetry nodes procedural modeling tips. I have been constructing my own pivots around elements I want to scale. I just randomly decided to look at the Scale Elements node, realizing it does all I want. This project has 100s of nodes and I am still learning!

I am not even finished with a small aprt of the front facade of 🥲🥲 This is gonna be a loooong ride

One of the first things I wrote for @puzzlingplaces.bsky.social was a procedural color system. Every color, including all UI, is a transformation matrix instead of a RGB value. The matrix transforms 4 key colors, which allows quick generation of procedural color scheme for each puzzles

added all the controls to the gates. One challenge of proceduralism is knowing what to expose. There are 20 different meaningfull paramters, but exposing all of them will be chaotic. Anyways nodes here: github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

Progress on the procedural cathedral gate in geometry nodes. Procedural toplogy can be very clean, I show the models topology at the end

Continuing with the front gate of the cathedral in geometry nodes. As usual no boolean, just procedural modeling. Depending on how many doors there are and building widths, the arcs adjust too! Nodes here: github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

Working on a little shader for @puzzlingplaces.bsky.social to allow peeking through walls to puzzle interiors. The shader part is a cone in view space, the tough part is mirroring everythign in CPU so that raycasts go through colliders where ever pixels are hidden

Humble begining, the front doors of the cathedral. Cologne cathedral took a 1000 years to build, I hope I finish this one faster

A tough part of procedural modeling is laying out the toplogy to extrude things from. For example for the enterance of the church, as the user extends the width of the building it needs to switch between 1-3 doors with adoptive lenghts, placed at the right spot. showed here

Blender 5.1 is almost here, and I am ready for that Ray cast node in the shader editor. Crazy useful for so many different effects and baking. Bonus is online asset libraries. Thats very useful for our studio use case.

🎉 Big news, puzzlers! 🎉 We’re super excited to announce that Puzzling Places - 3D Jigsaw Sim is coming to Steam on April 9th! 🧩 We can’t wait to share it all with you - be sure to wishlist now so you don’t miss out! #Steam #VRgaming #comingsoon

I am procrastinating on making the church. slowly running out of random stuff😅 So here, some defense towers in geometry nodes, I even tried to give the observation a realistic supprot. Nodes here: github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

It never ceases to amaze me how hyper developed our brain is to project meaning on anything that looks like a face. This whole shader is only a couple of nodes, but has such a vast possibility space of expressions

Since someone asked for it and it was easy to do, here a specific stall geo node with easy controls

flag placement

For my Blender geo node project I am slowly approaching the final boss, the church! I thought, lets keep it simple, maybe very early flamboyant, bit of Romanesque or norman style. Why not Bayeux cathedral, that one was simple! hahhaha no, jesus thats complicated

Added 3 different banner/ flag type. Again all geometry nodes, clean topology for animation and easy to place/ adjust. nodes here: github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

Another round of this toplogy stuff is way harder than it looks in geometry nodes. The flag keeps consistent topology for wind animation Nodes here: github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

I am so happy the tree is done, this killed me 🤡 So here some fully geo node procedural stylized tree. The hardest part was nailing the style and shading. Nodes here: github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

one of the coolest games we are publishing!! - for every copy sold we'll PLANT 1 REAL TREE!! - with "we" I mean developer @henrydriver.bsky.social who lives on a farm with space for trees - Treeplanter, a nature diorama builder - demo out now for Steam next fest. link below - full game coming soon

My tree is looking like a horror film prop, I hope with some more fluff it stops doing that

Unreal crashes. "You dont have enough VRAM on your GPU". I have a 5090 though🥲🥲 who has enough! VRAMHonestly with the quality of the 50series I dont know if I should be mad at Unreal or Nvidia. Probably both just to be sure.

typical for making tree trunks is: make a curve, curve to mesh with circle profile, modulate radius. Here is a very easy way of making the UVmaps for it. Y-axis is easy, its the normalized spline factor. X you can calculate on the circle with index/(circleVertexCount-1)

Another difficult one. Nailing the style was quite hard. I wanted stylized, but realized I need the global illumination from the BSDF at the very least, other wise it wont fit in the scene.

I finally have a triplanar node setup I am happy with in blender. Usually its such a mess because of the node noodle. The idea is you triplanar a closure in a repeat zone for each direction. This allows you generically triplanar anything without having to redo the boilder code.

Making the procedural cliffs almost made me gave up. Its so hard 😅If you can allow yourself baking maps, remeshing etc, the problem becomes trivially easy. But without it you are fighting the lack of resolution. Any ways semi happy with my current setup. next is trees

After generating the rock in geometry nodes, I didnt like how the dimensions and rotation was all over the place. So wrote an algo to align the longest dimension to Z and shortest to Y. Its a PCA that finds out the first, second and third eigen vector, to get the true OBB

I think I have a rock generation algo I am semi happy with. The way this works is that I start with a shape, then in a Repeat zone chip away from it from all edges several times. This is how I used to sculpt rocks with actual clay too.

I couldnt move on with my previous implementation for the wall. (you can see the old one from second 10). The new one, the merlones and support arcs keep verticality and also through ray cast snap to the topology below them. This was so much work 🥲

The walls were both very easy to do as well as left a bad taste in my mouth. these walls work only on flat surfaces, turns out walls going over curved surfaces are quite complicated. You cant do them without introducing complex steps like topology