we've got round sprinkles why not long sprinkles it'll be more interesting and it'll enable us to uh learn some new techniques about blender which is what this whole series is about so first things first we need to uh model those sprinkles so let's move to the left here and uh we want to add an object we haven't mentioned it before but when you add an object it's going to put it at your 3D cursor and your 3D cursor is that thing that weird little thing little Crosshair at the bottom there that's your 3D cursor and uh yeah I don't know blunder has a 3D cursor maybe other applications don't it's going to put it there and if you don't want it there you can move that 3D cursor somewhere else by hitting shift and right clicking and you can see it's now moved it and actually attached it to the plane which is where we would want it if you don't have a mouse do get a mouse but in the interim you can also use the the uh cursor tool and that'll do uh the same thing all right so we're adding long sprinkles so obviously the object that we want to add is shift a mesh it's the cylinder okay too big by default so let's change click this little thing bring this up change the radius all the way to its lowest and the depth all the way to its lowest as well and the vertices that's the uh like the resolution right oh we'll fix that in a sec um the resolution it' be way too high at 32 to be scattered on an object so let's set this to 12 and that'll be just enough that it won't look Jagged and it'll look smooth okay great now I'm going to move this up just so it's above the plane Zed okay now this problem that you have if you go in too far it disappears the reason for that is that uh blender has a clipping start value and because we're working at such a small small scale we've got sprinkle sized things now um it's too small and it's clipping it out so if you hit n and go to your view tab the clip start value there it's 1 cm by default drag it all the way to the left and it's now a millimeter and it will have fixed that I don't know why it's not the default like maybe somebody can tell me why is that not the default value maybe there's a reason but to me that would make sense cuz then you never have this problem I don't know any disadvantages so anyway we've got uh the base of a Sprinkle need to make it long so tab into edit mode s scale it Zed along the Z axis to elongate it and now we've got the rough length of a Sprinkle but how long is a Sprinkle there's no actual answer to that if you look at reference they are all over the place the government evidently never stepped in and said like we're going to regulate it this is the the length of a Sprinkle this is the size of a spring I mean it's it's it's the wild west out there they're doing crazy things so uh what that means as artists is we get to pick whatever is most visually pleasing and I like the ones which are more readable and to show you what I mean if we pull up two right this one on the left is like large sprinkles right very like bold and then one on the right here is like long thin wispy ones that look like theyd get stuck in your teeth and if we zoom out on this and then zoom out on this you can see that the ones on the right tend to kind of like the colors and everything just kind of blur together and it just looks like a dut whereas the one on the left the sprinkles are still readable so that's what we mean by readable and that's the one I like the most so we're going to go with some uh larger looking long sprinkles but you can see that the sizes there's no standard size because I think it's actually like it's from a Piping Bag at least if you make them at home but you can just pipe out icing and then when it dries you just smash it up and it becomes sprinkles um but yeah they they just come out at any odd size so we got long ones we got medium ones we got short ones and we've even got some curvy looking ones right these little like like just slightly bsh looking ones so we're going to model small medium large and a bsh looking one and then we're going to scatter that across the object so back in blender this is going to be yeah let's this this will be the the short one uh okay but the end speaking of which this end bit here uh it's a very sharp edge and even if we hit uh shade smooth it's not going to solve it we want that like a rounded form to it not this hor Blobby looking shape um because the reference again you can see oh it's another it's a different reference now is uh is a rounded shape all right so to create that rounded form we're going to create a bevel and so I want you to go into face select mode okay which you can do by that so this is the faces right this is the edges if you go to Edge select mode and then this is the the face there so select the bottom and the top face like that and then we're going to add a bell which will immediately become clear when you do it contrl B and now that we're in this state as we pull out we can change the the amount of the bevel and this is uh you can see it's it's like yeah it's just adding a 45° angle on that that corner there but if you scroll up it's going to add another level to it and if you scroll up again it's going to add another level to that so we can very quickly create a rounded Edge to the sprinkle uh you don't want to go too much higher because again this is going to be scattered all over the donut you don't want to go too high poly so that'll do so that's a simple bevel operation and it's very common when you're modeling so yeah contrl B is how you do that all right so look at that we've got one sprinkle so now we need to create three more so this is the small so let's go shift d and then X to just move it along the x-axis this is going to be the medium one so edit mode and I'm going to go into toggle YF frame and verticy select mode and now selecting the top part of the sprinkle hit G Zed and I'm going to move oops if you got proportional editing turn that off g z move that up okay that'll be the medium one yep and now shift d x move it along this is going to be the long one so edit mode and again g z move it up and this is going to be the long sprinkle I don't go too long maybe that long okay and then I want to make a bent sprinkle it's slightly like curved so shift d x move it across and now with this one if I was to try to like curve this out there's not enough information here like if I move that it's just a straight edge there so if I want to make it curved I got to have more geometry there so like we've done in the past crlr is how you create a loop cut so when you do that it says where do you want to put it I want more than one though so I'm going to scroll up till I get yeah just a bunch of Loops until I get what looks like squ square faces on those points somewhere around that I don't want to go too high poly yeah like that what is that that's in the bottom leftand corner eight eight Cuts Okay click and then it's say way do you want to place it right click to cancel the movement so it places it right in the center and now there we go okay now we've got this one over here that is just long and straight but low poly and this one same shape but High poly so to add a uh Bend to it in previous tutorials I actually went into like edit mode and we did like proportional editing and it was just complicated and it actually didn't look great I've learned actually there's a modifier that'll do it very simply go to your modifier stack add modifier uh you could find it inside here uh or you could search for it but it's the simple deform uh modifier so add that and by default it is wrong so change it from twist to bend and look at that we've got our sprinkle ha and you can very easily whoops change the amount from a little curve to a large curve and I think somewhere around the 30° Mark you will notice though that it's it's like it's bent more at this angle and that's because it's bending it according to the origin point so you see these little dots you might have wondered what they are in blender that's called your origin point and it's used for a lot of things like if you rotate an object you can see it's rotating from the point of that origin Point um like physics a bunch of things use the origin point the best way to think of it is like the center of mass for the object so generally speaking as a rule of thumb you want it to be in the center of the object and you can do it very quickly you select multiple objects you want to clear its uh origin Point shift select all of them and then right click and then say set origin origin to geometry and now you can see it's put it in the middle and now our curve is actually based on the uh starting in the middle which is what we want so y for us now I need to apply app this or else the next part it'll go wonky so apply your simple to form so that it's actually uh yeah uh realized onto the uh onto the mesh okay so going to your outline you can see we've well we started from humble beginnings but we've now got too much going on and it's it's all starting to get a little bit chaotic so the way you organize things in your outline and in blender generally uh is uh you can group things together um by creating collections so by default we've actually got one collection already just called collection but we can create new collections by this little button in the top right hand corner to create new collection um and I want to create it outside of our I mean I don't actually know if we need like I don't know why it creates a collection for you for no I mean you could just it's in the scene collection anyways I don't know if we actually need that one um so we create a new collection just by hitting that and we can double click it to rename it to be whatever it is we want so I'm going to call this sprinkles okay um and because we have two types of sprinkles we have the sphere round sprinkle and then we have these long sprinkles I'm going to create two other um collections within this collection so hitting new again you can see it's placed it underneath it and I'm going to call this one round and then clicking sprinkles again I'll add another collection and this one I will call long oh wait sorry this one long there we go okay so to move something to a collection you can do it one of two ways one you can select the uh the sphere which is the round remember it's this little guy over here the little tiny round sprinkle you can just drag that into the uh that collection and you can see it's now moved it there the other way is in your 3D viewport if you select all of the objects that you want to move to a new collection hit M and it brings up this and you just say move to the sprinkles long sub collection there we go and now they're all moved there and now this one here if you wanted to give this a name you could um we got the camera we got the light we got the plane yeah you know what let's move our donut our donut and our icing let's move that to a new collection as well so M and we can actually create a new collection from the move uh options as well so I'm going to go new and let's call this do let's say Donuts cuz we're going to duplicate and make more Donuts in the future so Donuts okay great so now this one here has got the camera the light and the plane so I'm going to do what I sometimes do with a scene is just call this one EnV which is for environment since this is a tutorial I'll actually just type it out I'm not going to be lazy environment Okay so we've got some organization in our scene so that as we add and grow our scene it's not going to get too uh crazy all right so it's also good that we've created collections because we can now use that to scatter across the geometry notes so with our uh donut here so the icing and the donut we're going to create a duplicate and uh this is going to be the variant with the long sprinkles so shift D and then hit X to move it along the uh x axis so let's just place next to it and then clicking your icing you can see we've got the modify stack that we've uh we created the geometry nodes on and if we were to start tweaking this and make this look like long sprinkles it would apply to this one over here because we can see that little number next to it and that number if you hover over it I think we mentioned it before but displays the number of users sharing this data so any change you make to this is going to be reflected on that one um so if we click the two button it's now independent so we'll now have two different versions so the one on the left the one the original one let's call that round sprinkles and the one on the right let's call that one long brain fart for a second there long sprinkles okay and now with that object selected let's go back to the geometry nodes tab okay all right so make sure you're looking at the right object make sure it's the the one with long sprinkles in the name and if we were to start editing here we would have one we we would have made one big mistake and it would it's because this is actually not the long sprinkles node setup we click the pin button remember that the pin means it's always going to be there even if it's another object with a different geometry node setup so remember yeah it's a common mistake you always do it you forget you've got pin on and you start changing things and it does the wrong one so make sure you're looking at the one that has long sprinkles in the name okay so the bit the bit that obviously matters the most is this this bit where it goes into our instance on points node and we've currently got it connected to a sphere so I mean you could change that to another object but that won't help us because we've got more than one object we want to scatter four different objects across it so we can delete that and instead just drag from your outliner don't just uh if if you click on it um oh yeah yeah if you click off it it's just going to disappear so make sure you don't do it uh you've clicked the icing but you need to click and drag into your node setup and now it's got a collection info node rather than object info node drag that into your instance input and nothing happened it has actually happened but it's off center in a weird place why is it doing that it's because of the way 3D software handles data it's now doing it on its like Global or local position not Rel relative to anyway it doesn't matter all what you need to do is check three boxes whenever you use collections to scatter separate reset children now it's on the mesh correctly and then it's you can see it's actually using all four of them on each point so then you click pick instance and now it's going to use one of those not all four of them together okay so it's good it's uh it's using it but what's going on well the reason reason this one was easier with its round sprinkles is that the rotation of the objects didn't matter because it was round now that we have long sprinkles you can see the rotation matters and it's currently screwed up so how do we fix that the first way well yeah there's a number of things you need to do to make it work correctly you you'll see is uh we want to take the rotation of the face so the face of this these mesh here we want it to affect the objects right so we take the output of our distribute points on faces the rotation of that and drag it into the rotation input of the instances and now you can see it's having some effect it's still not right but that is because these sprinkles are currently just pointed upwards so it thinks okay well you want to point them all outwards anyways to fix that I mean you could fix it a number you could actually fix it in Geometry noes this is simpler so if we just rotate those sprinkles along the x axis so RX right and then we just want to to lie them down flat so essentially 90° you could type in 90° or holding down control we'll move it in 5° increments okay so 90 and then do a single click okay so why has that not worked well it's because as I mentioned before when you're scaling or rotating things it's not actually saved to the object so to apply it you have to go control a and then say rotation now that we've done that it's worked correctly all right so now you can see what I said by uh to do a lot to make it work correctly um the rotation is working but it's not doing what you would expect and that's because geometry nodes are so flexible you have to tell it exactly what you want to do we want actually random rotation so around each of the points we don't want to each have the exact same rotation we need to randomize it so for that if you want to tweak the rotation on anything between this point here on this uh dotted Blue Line let's just move that out the way uh we need to add shift a utility rotation rotate not Ula Oiler that yes I know they went with the weird pronunciation I think it was a Frenchman right could be German doesn't matter same same right just to annoy all the Europeans um anyways rotate Oiler and we're just going to drop it on that line till it lines up okay so nothing's happened currently but with this we could change the rotation of our sprinkles up here but you'll notice that as you rotate it's kind of weird it's not the rotation that you would expect for each point it's the relative to the actual object as a whole right which just means we need to change from object to local and now as you move it around you can see we're able to rotate those sprinkles but again it's not changing the RO like randomizing it it's giving a solid value so to randomize it if we drag out of the rotate by input and then type in random it'll bring up uh this and we're looking for random value Val click and now we get this ooh so this node looks kind of scary right it's got a whole bunch of different values in it and it says vector and it's very very foreign it's actually easy to understand it from a float uh point of view with with the random value if it's in a float State it's going to generate a value from zero to one on each point so if you've got like 10 points one of them is going to be like 015 one is going to be like 092 and one's you know whatever when it's in Vector State it's the exact same thing you've got Min and you've got Max but there are three values and the reason for that is that there are three axes there's the x axis there's the y axis and there's the Zed axis and same here right so you're able to Define what type of rotation on each axis so if we set both uh by the way if you want to change multiple values at once in blender um you can just click and drag down and then you can uh change all of them so we set all of them to zero and uh now you could see this bottom one is going to be the Zed because it's XY Z it doesn't tell you like I don't know because it's Vector math I guess it's there's other areas of PL anyway but this this is the Zed axis if we increase this one you can see that's the main one that we want to change right because that's the one that makes uh the most difference now you might also know looking at this you're probably thinking like okay well we need to rotate it by 360° so we would set this to 300 60 but you can see they're more than rotating fully already so what value is this exactly this is radians oh just to get real so radians degrees actually like I had to ask chat gbt before I recorded this what's the difference radians are more mathematical and easier for mathematical equations uh it's uh it's the circumference of Pi No 2 pi is the circumference look obviously I don't know um but what I'm trying to tell you is it's you just need double pi to to make it 360° which is actually to to make it really complicated it's to so double Pi so Pi is uh 3142 to is double that and uh anyways you get the idea so you can type in to and it'll actually give you the correct value so that's 360° rotation um we also want it cuz you can see this is the other axes like the the middle one spinning around so we also want it on that one cuz we've got a curved one so let's make that towel and then this top one is the X which is actually going to make it like wonky like so these will be like seesing up so if you increase that that's where it gets crazy and you don't really want to use that um you do want a little bit though because it it would make sense if they're sprinkles they're not going to be completely flat you're going to have some variance where like some bit has absorbed into the icing at a different angle than another but just not too much essentially or else it starts to look like uh like little marshmallows or whatever all over it um but guys that's roughly it that's the hard work that was I mean I know that was very technical but it was really it was just two notes rotate Oiler set it to local and then this random value and we're changing that to rotate and we did it we got nice looking rotation now one thing we do have to change is the distance Min so because these longer sprinkles obviously are bigger then the distance Min has to change as well so we can change that to something that makes sense let's go 04 H that might have actually been pretty perfect let's try three three's got a little bit oh actually you know what the other thing I again looking at reference I like those big chunky looking sprinkles so I want these to be bigger so we could you know alter the scale of the actual sprinkles but we're working with geometry nodes and we've actually got a scale value right here so we could change it here just as easily so the scale dragging down and again there's not just one value there's three axis so XY Z so drag down on all 1.5 is going to give us some nice big chunky looking sprinkles and now this distance value needs to be a lot bigger so let's go 06 that's actually pretty good I I'm getting pretty good at nailing it no no no I was right before there's always going to be some overlap right you're not going to be able to stop it cuz it's it's not look doing object like collisions it's nothing like that it's a very simple again it's doing a point and then it's creating a radius around it and if you do the correct amount which for this is probably something like this then it looks way too predictable and boring which we don't want so uh 0.6 looks pretty good for me with a scale of 1.5 for these and that is it um I was going to put in the uh random color in this part of the tutorial but I think we've gone over already so join me in the next part and we will finally add some color to our sprinkles and make this look nice so join me in the next part