A Tower of Fruit & Wine 🤔- Modelling the Improbable & Quirky with a Tree of Instancing Geometry Nodes

I wanted to make a post and discuss a tree of ‘instancing geometry-nodes’ I had been working on, originally to produce Rose Window designs. I worked on this a couple of weeks ago and produced the first design – The Cosmos Flower Rose Window; which you may have read about in a previous. post.

I was going to write a more in-depth post on this geometry node set-up for the Rose windows, but having a wandering creative mind as I do, it often jumps and thinks about creating something else before I have got to writing that in-depth post…after all I am certainly more of an artistic person than a writer!

So today that is what I started doing. I had a thought about extending that geometry node set-up so I could build ‘up’, as well as ‘out’. So I set about it and modelled what you are seeing in this post. I also wanted to demonstrate this with something ‘quirky’…just for fun😊. So I built a ‘Tower of Fruit & Wine’. now I know when you look at this tower it is most probably physically impossible…but that is the great thing with Blender! You can make the impossible ‘possible’, and that is why I love this work.

So lets have a quick look at this twelve layer geometry node set-up for the Fruit & Wine Tower in the rendered image:

Geometry Node 12 layer set up for the Fruit & Wine Tower:

The Individual geometry node frame set:

The Geometry node frame – expanded:

So What is going on in the expanded node frame above ?

So what we are doing essentially is ‘instancing’ an modelled object on a ‘Curve Circle’, which is to say we are taking that object and Blender is creating one instance of that object on every vertices of the specified Curve Circle resolution – Which in the above you will see has a resolution of 12 vertices. This resolution can be anything we specify, as can the Curve Circle Radius, which in the above you will see is set at 4.8 mm.

This expanded frame above is creating the first layer of ‘Pears’ sat on top of the layer of Apples. So lets try and break it down a little into bullet points for the above image.

• The ‘Instance on Points’ node takes the information from the ‘Curve Circle‘ node (Resolution + Radius) and instances the Object, fed in from the ‘Object Info‘ node.
• Object Info node – takes the ‘Pear_1’ object and ‘instances’ this on the points/vertices of the Curve Circle via the ‘Instance on Points’ node.
• The ‘Transform Geometry’ node is used to move that circle of Object (pear_1) if we need to rotate it into place, or move it up or down.
• The ‘Map Range’ and ‘Align Eular to Vector’ nodes are fed into the Rotation input of the ‘Instance on Points’, and are used to align all the objects to face the same central vector – rather than them all facing north, south, east, or west as such!
• The two blue ‘Math Nodes’, in this case the ‘Floored Modulo’ and ‘Equal’ nodes, feeding into the Selection input of the ‘Instance on Points’ are used if we want to skip or subtract some of the instances. In this case we are just instancing all 12 Pear_1 Objects.

So that is essentially what is going on for each branch of the node-tree, generating our ‘Tower of Fruit & Wine’. Of course each branch of this tree will have it’s specific objects, in this model it is either the ‘Apple’, ‘Pear’, or ‘Wine Glass’.

The great thing about this is you can build as high, wide, or as complex as you heart desires, or your computer can handle 😊.

And of course you can play about and move objects in all directions, so you are only limited by your imagination!

The End Results of the above geometry node set-up:

Of course it doesn’t stop here, you of course need to apply you relevant materials, lighting, HDRI set-up, and render the final image…but these are for another post. Maybe in the next next post I will discuss the procedural material set-up for the Pear you see in the image…it is quite complex but fun and interesting to build!

Here is my first render from the above set-up:

What do you think? Quirky but fun isn’t it😊. Of course given more time you would spend time maybe on varying the materials a little to mix up the fruit finish, but I think for a first render and for this demo image resolution this is probably enough.

Anyway, I hope you like my fun ‘Tower of Fruit & Wine! do let me know what you think? I know it is probably physically impossible in real-life! but this is Blender modelling life…not real life😉.

I hope you like the post. Contact me if you want more information on how to set this up. I hope you all have a great day!

Kind regards, Jay