Tutorial: Create Glowing Crystals in Blender (No Modeling or Geo Nodes)

Tutorial / 27 January 2022

It's here! The Glowing crystals tutorial is on YouTube and waiting just for you!

Generate crystals with nothing more than modifiers on a basic mesh? Yes! There's no need to jump into geometry nodes either. Create endless variation with just a few clicks and spend your time making the rest of your seen! While my earlier crystal tutorial spent quite a bit of it's time using the free Bool Tool add-on to create shapes and cleaning up the mesh, much of this tutorial is about material creation since actually making the shape takes no time at all! 

For the beginner this tutorial will give you some idea of what can be done without ever modeling a mesh and instead use modifiers to make generative shapes in order to quickly populate a scene. We will also be creating some procedural materials rather than only relying on texture sets. 

The tutorial uses a number of free texture assets as part of a material. Here are the links for those! You will only need the roughness maps from these sets.
Scratched metal
Plastic

The scene is lit by an HDRI. Download it here. Grab the HDR format. Any resolution will be fine since it will not show in the final render.
Artist Workshop

Want to try another method of creating similar crystals in Blender? Check out my earlier tutorial using the boolean method!


Help support my work and more tutorials! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/KarlBeiler 

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