Prototyping the Geonodes Tutorial Examples

The above video goes to a few work in progress examples of what will be presented in the geonodes tutorial. Ultimately each of these subjects will get its own dedicated video and in the future many of these topics will be revisited in more detail. Right now the idea is to use specific scientific examples to give a broad overview of the features in geometry nodes that might be interesting to scientists/engineers making figures. 

Each example is meant to showcase how modular the system can be and to convey the programming-style logic that underpins working with geometry nodes. At the same time it's meant to show that even without any of that knowledge you can pickup a well made node network and use it without having to understand how it works. I'm particularly pleased with the copolymer examples because geonodes can be crudely broken down into three areas: mesh, instances, and curves. Many of the examples I have are more focused on mesh and instancing. Lattices, cutouts, and cell membranes will all rely heavily on instancing, distributions, and mesh objects. Polymers are the perfect excuse to really get into some of the features of curves. The example here is meant to focus on just how quickly and easily you could make something complex like a star polymer, or a core/corona structure. And though I only present the simple adjustments to the end user (bond radius, number of monomers, relative block size, etc) there are tons of extra customization options. The "bonds" don't need to be cylindrical. The "monomers" don't need to be spheres. It could be a block copolymer with two monomers, or three, or four, etc. Random and statistical as well. Perhaps even getting into the nitty gritty of syndiotactic and isotactic down the road. For now I'll start with simple examples. 

Perhaps the most exciting example will be animations. I'm still on the fence about if I want to include them in the basics tutorial. In my mind they're a bit beyond the scope of making standard figures for journals. They will definitely be featuring on the channel though. The raycast node alone has the potential to enable a lot of awesome animations. The first one I have my eye on is an animation to show photolithography, inspired by a post I saw on Twitter by the user @VladimirGallery (Original tweet: https://twitter.com/VladimirGallery/status/1463524055148113925)

There are still some bugs in the beta release of Blender 3.0 that I've noticed. Specifically there are glitches that depend on which render engine is being used. That said, the teachable points in the initial tutorial should be useful in the longer term and will make way for an absolute boatload of free asset releases in 2022 in the form of node networks that will really help make better 3D figures very accessible to beginners. 

Now I just need to figure out if it's going to be possible to mark geometry node networks as assets.