Hexagonal Tiles - Getting started with Blender Nodes Part 5

This time we're creating a Hexagonal Tiling node that's going to let us turn a plane into a fully 3D Hexagonal Tile material for all of your tiling needs!

Apologies if my voice is a bit croaky, I've just been feeling a little under the weather!

Contents:
00:00 - Intro
01:03 - Understanding hexagons
02:32 - Making a hexagon
04:05 - Creating the hexagon array
10:30 - Adding displacement
12:52 - Building the group node
16:22 - Example scene and material use

Please let me know how I can improve these videos!

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Shortcuts:

SHIFT+A: Add menu
SHIFT+D: Duplicate node
CTRL+SHIFT+D: Duplicate with connected inputs
CTRL+H: Hide unused node sockets
H: Minimise selected node
M: Mute selected node
CTRL+J: Frame selected nodes
CTRL+G: Group selected nodes
SHIFT+TAB: Turn on snapping
CTRL+SPACE: Maximise work area
G: Grab (especially useful when trying to move reroutes)
CTRL+X: Dissolve node
CTRL+Right Click: Cut noodle
SHIFT+Right Click: Add reroute
D+Left Click: Draw annotation
D+Right Click: Erase annotation
CTRL+Drag a slider to snap
SHIFT+Drag a slider for fine adjustments

Nodes Used:

INPUT
-UV Map
-Value
TEXTURE
-White Noise
COLOUR
-Invert
-MixRGB
+Colour Dodge
+Colour Burn
+Mix
-RGB Curves
VECTOR
-Mapping
CONVERTER
-CombineXYZ
-Math
+Square Root
+Maximum
+Less Than
+Multiply
+Minimum
+Subtract
+Divide
+Add
-SeparateXYZ
-Vector Math
+Scale
+Multiply
+Add
+Divide
+Modulo
+Snap
+Absolute
+Normalise
+Dot Product

[AhmedNassef]

Man! I've been looking for a procedural hexagonal pattern tutorial like this for ever!
THANK YOU! ❤️

[vstreet]

Another BRILLIANT tutorial. Thoroughly enjoyable. As an older guy, my head is hurting, but only because I am using parts of my brain that have laid dormant for many years. 
How you explain and what you explain, makes perfect sense.Great speed, great content. PERFECT! 
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. THANK YOU! Dg

[CristineTellier]

Very, very useful! I'm learning a lot with your tutorials. Thank you!

[teemurimpinen]

As many have already stated in the comments: this video is absolutely awesome. It's kind of funny how complicated it is to have good-quality procedural
hex tiles in Blender.

Having gone through numerous videos and tutorials on Blender as a semi-beginner (just a couple of years of experience with the software), I think this video is, relatively speaking, right up there on the advanced / professional level. Thus, it is
bit heavy for a "getting started" category (a complete beginner should definitely start with something way easier).
The pace is also quite fast at times but it's nothing that a playback speed button can't fix if needed.

Nevertheless, all of the results presented here are still possible to achieve even for a beginner and it definitely widens one's
understanding of the way the math nodes work. And the jungle of nodes is definitely worth plowing through. The
results are fantastic and a lot of time is saved for later projects.

Thank you for this.

[sloppyprogrammer]

Thanks so much, this helped me so much in my quest of making procedural hexagonal maps in unity. I'm spamming this under all your videos, you really deserve the recognition. Can't wait for a CG math series it would help me so much.

[metalgynoid]

Excellent explanation, dude! Great Video! Thank You!

[theagileaardvark]

Nice video. Spread it on a few Blender/3D related discord servers as well.

[quiltcoverijimo]

Can you explain a bit further in 3:53? I don't understand why the diamond turns into a hexagon after you add normalize. Also can you explain a bit how does the normalize affect the x y coordinates? I know that it will convert all vectors to 0 to 1 range, but when I add normalize to the object coordinate it will turn the coordinate system to something similar to the radial gradient and I dont understand what is happening. Thx and nice video btw

[mamounodeh]

Now I understarded! best !! but having Fun hahaha, Thanks

[darth_sdmhcd]

God bless your pure soul for this, amazing tutorial!

[maxgrey]

I don't understand it 100% but the math here is beautiful! I love seeing people make stuff like this with nodes. I've made a few pattern generators in blender over the years and it always blows my mind how intricate some of it is, and how changing a few values at random can create literally millions of uniquely generated patterns. Somehow I've never gotten around to using my generators for much of anything, but I'm hoping to try combining my latest creation with Substance Designer to potentially create a crazy fast abstract ornament generator.

[minakill]

I needed tutorial for hexagon pattern that can be used purely as texture this will be very helpful.

[BarigaBlinami]

It is very You blow my mind!!! Is there some education about math and vector nodes?? About operators of it?

[jaimerojas]

ASMR Blender tutorials nice, and holy fuck I didn't get any of the math to this lol, I mean is a very good step by step tutorial but I was just curious on how difficult achieving this result would be, really nice work <3

[manuelp]

Very cool, thanks a lot. But which file are you appending in the end of your video to add that gate-node?

[gottagowork]

Vector length is also a useful output if you want to maximum pack round shapes., i.e. packing coins as a surface.
Angle adjusted and snapped radial gradient can also be useful to split into sectors, i.e. faux shaded 3D cubes.
I haven't given it much thought, but how would you get the U and V index coordinate? Useful for snapping texture to the hex grid or excluding the half edges.

[willembeerens]

since the tiles still show some repetitiveness, especially the darker ones, I tried to figure out how to randomly rotate the stone textures, but in this spaghetti I would not know where to plug in. Any ideas?

[mattfenner]

Thank you, not only was it practically useful for what I'm doing now, but very inspiring too, I hope to think as intuitively about textures one day as you. I want to learn more about the mathematics side of geometry, but I'm unsure what to call this area of maths? Graphing? Algrebraic geometry?

[nmnovice]

Your channel is a real revelation! Amazing tutorials, indeed! I have one request, if this isn't too much (I think it's quite simple for you, but seems a bit complicated to me): I'm experimenting with floor and wall tiles, and I'd like to be able to offset them at will along the length or crosswise, but the problem is I can't easily match the image texture I'm using (or multiple ones) with the procedural tile size. Is there a smart way to match one or more image textures of tiles (or boards, it's the same) with the space produced by a procedural tiling node like the ones you show in your videos? I would be grateful if you publish something about that, or even a Mega-node with inputs for image textures and options to tile them procedurally in various shapes and patterns. I would certainly buy a node like that. Thanks in advance, and congrats for all these amazing tutorials!

[lyvdkwq]

For what reason did you use max funciton at 3:11? I can't get an image of what the gradient of the hexagon looks like using this function...