Blooming Flowers in Blender 3D with Grease Pencil and Geometry Nodes: Overview and Free Download
Hey everyone, it’s Kevin! In this post, I’ll be showing you how to create these blooming flowers in Blender 3D using Grease Pencil and Geometry Nodes. Whether you’re a seasoned 3D artist or just starting out, this tutorial is for you.
Two years ago, I created some blooming roses as a fun Grease Pencil experiment. Last year, I reused that to create these generative roses with Geometry Nodes as part of an art-nouveau-inspired floral piece. Now, I’m excited to share this setup with you so you can create your own blooming flowers.
If you're new to Grease Pencil, it's an object that allows you to draw 2D in 3D space. And if you don't know what Geometry Nodes is, it’s a node-based feature that allows creating complex 3D Models, procedural effects, and animations.
To get started, I'll be using the roses. When I initially made this, I referenced a video from All the Works, so if you want a more holistic tutorial on this, I definitely recommend checking out their channel. The way I have this set up is I have these grease pencil elements, which are these rose heads and leaves instanced along a curve using a geometry node system. When grease pencil objects are instanced in this way, they can also retain their animations which is why they bloom.
Step 1: Set up the stem
The first step is to set up the stem for your flower. Here, I use the Curve to Mesh node that uses a Curve Circle as a profile curve. Then, I use the Set Material node to designate a brown material which is just a diffuse BSDF set to a brown color.
Step 2: Add the leaves
Next, add the leaves to your flower. I created 5 different Grease Pencil objects for the leaves and put them into a collection. I brought in an Instance on Points node and brought in the leaves collection to instance. The Align Euler to Vector ensures that the leaves are upright with the Curve Tangent node to help follow the curvature of the paths. To control the scale, I used the Spline Parameter to determine the total length of the drawn curves and this Color Ramp (set to constant) controls the visibility of the instances along the curve.
Step 3: Create the rose heads
Finally, create the rose heads for your flower. They're set up very similarly to the rose leaves, except that some of the numerical values have changed and it instances a different collection, the one with the 3 Rose Heads. If you want to check out that process in more detail, I’ll put a link to that video from 2 years ago where I first showed them. I created them petal by petal and used the interpolation tools to animate their position and scale.
With these steps, you can create beautiful blooming flowers in Blender 3D. But wait, there's more! In addition to the roses, you can also create a flower vine using the same techniques. You can find those Grease Pencil assets in the “Flower Vine” collection. This system utilizes the same idea of the roses except I have these flowers instead of leaves and then these golden roses.
To wrap up, I want to say that I know that Geometry Nodes is a constantly changing feature and dedicated support for Grease Pencil with Geometry Nodes is planned for future updates. But, I wanted to make this tutorial for anyone that was curious and wanted to experiment with this setup. Hope you enjoy!
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