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 https://ambientcg.com/view?id=PaintedMetal001
Plastic https://ambientcg.com/view?id=Plastic003

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 https://polyhaven.com/a/artist_workshop

You can follow progress of current projects on any of the following platforms!
Blog: https://www.artstation.com/karlb/blog
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