- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to take a look
at how we use fields to create organic growth patterns.
So let's select our Cloner.
We've already got it set up.
It's in object mode
and the cubes are being cloned onto this Taurus.
And so with the cloner selected,
we'll come in and create a plane effector.
Now I don't want to change anything with the position,
but I would like to change the scale of these clones
uniformly by about three.
Okay, so that looks okay to me.
And then in the fall off tab,
we're going to create a spherical field,
which will be kind of like our seed object.
So this is what's going to drive all the growth.
So I'm going to bring this in a bit closer,
and you can see as I move it in,
we're starting to have a little effect on these clones here.
They're already starting to grow.
And essentially what we'll do
is we'll grow out this pattern,
but we'll do it in a more organic way.
So I've set this down now to about 35.
We're just going to take this information
and then it will be the driver for another layer.
So in the modify layers, we're going to add a freeze layer,
and the freeze layer has now stored,
the current state of the fields list.
We'll change the mode to grow.
And if we just rewind this and play,
that's basically the effect it's growing organically.
Now we can just come back and refine this
because this leading edge needs some work.
And also we don't want to see anything
that isn't grown already.
So we're going to take this plain effect
and go into the parameters tab
and just check on visibility here is right at the bottom.
And now as soon as we do that,
all the clones that aren't in the area of influence
will not be visible,
so we can just rewind and play,
and now you see we've got a cool growth pattern happening.
But yeah, let's do some further work on this.
Now let's come in and we can just get a good look
at this edge and we'll add a random field.
Okay, we need to overlay this
just so it's not taking over the whole thing.
And if we toggle this,
it's changing the edge
and breaking up the pattern a little bit more.
Okay, so even here we can see
that's what I'm talking about,
breaking this up, instead of it being too smooth.
So with that done,
we can modify this even more and use the random field,
the data that we have on here and all this information
in this noise pattern to drive another field layer.
So we'll come in, we're going to add another freeze.
And this is saying okay, I've got that state.
And what I want to do is subtract this information.
So you see how it's broken up this edge right here.
We'll change the mode to one of the other growing modes
called average and turn on auto update so that we can see
the results or rewind this and just play through.
And now we get this amazing look to the organic growth.
It's all based on that noise pattern
by using this freeze layer with the subtract blending mode,
we're taking away certain values,
and this will produce gaps.
So we're visualizing the noise on the surface.
So what we can do is refine this
by coming into the random field.
And that's just, we could either change the noise.
Let's go with narky and we'll increase the scale.
And maybe, I don't know, we could change it again,
we can change our mind as much as we like,
but even then that's giving us something
pretty, pretty cool.
And let's just step through some of these
and see if it changes.
That's something different again,
let's go back to the Perlin noise.
I quite like that one,
and we're getting a bit of flickering
and flashing and stuff,
but I think we can solve that
because what we need to do is
just tame the effect a little bit.
So it's going a bit too quickly.
Maybe we can drop the initial freeze layer down
to about eight and we can leave the effect,
strength alone at the moment,
let's select the top freeze layer
and we'll set the effect strength to 80.
Let's just play that and it's still not quite right.
And I think what we need to do is just adjust the size
of this random field or even the seed
and we'll change the noise type as well.
So we've solved all that flickering,
which was a bit annoying to look at.
And now I think we can work on some other things,
cause the color is a bit plain at the moment.
If we just turn on color for the freeze layer,
we could add some remapping on this calorie map
and that's currently green,
let's give it a sort of bluish color.
And I like the look of that a lot more.
Let's turn on the color channel for the random field.
Well, that's interesting
then what happens when we subtract?
Well, that's flickering a bit, so I'm going to turn that off,
but the random field is actually a pretty nice look.
So this is the basis of it all.
Now it's just a case of playing around
and refining everything.
We got the spherical field,
which gives us the initial information for the growth.
And then we're freezing that state and telling it to grow
based on a radius and a fake strength
then we broke up the leading edge with a random field.
And then finally we took the information
we've stored with these three layers
and took it away and then grew based on that.
And the end result is this very organic growth pattern.
That is a very flexible setup,
which you can use in other objects.
You could use this in a Vertex map
and so I invite you to check out
the scene file and just have a play around.
This is one of my favorite uses of fields.
And now you know how to create
procedural growth patterns too.