Your First Scene
Build a complete scene from scratch in six nodes.
This walks through building a whole scene from an empty graph. You’ll make a grid, displace it into hills, scatter points across it, and copy a sphere onto each of those points.
It’s a pretty typical procedural setup, most of what you build will follow a similar shape.
Before you start
Enzo opens with four panels. The network editor on the left is where you build the graph, the viewport on the right shows the result. The parameters panel floats over the top right of the network editor and shows the parameters of whatever node you’re working on. The spreadsheet along the bottom shows the raw numbers behind the geometry.
You only need the network editor, the viewport and the spreadsheet here. The Interface covers all of them properly.
Add a Grid
Hover over the network editor and press Tab. A search box opens at your cursor. Type grid
to filter the list and press Enter to place it. ↑ and ↓ move the
highlight if what you want isn’t first, Esc closes without placing anything.
The node is created where your cursor was and the parameters panel appears in the top right. Set Rows
and Columns to 20, this gives you enough points to work with later. Size is the width and depth of
the grid in world units, leave it at 10.
Push it into hills with Mountain
Press Tab again, type mountain, press Enter.
Now wire them together. Inputs are the dots along the top edge of a node and outputs are the dots along
the bottom, so graphs read top to bottom. Drag from the dot at the bottom of grid1 to the dot at the
top of mountain1. A curve connects the two and geometry flows from the Grid into the Mountain.
Mountain displaces the points it’s given, so the flat grid becomes hills. Adjust its parameters until they read clearly in the viewport.
To remove a link, hold Ctrl and click it. Ctrl and drag cuts every link you drag across. Delete removes the selected nodes.
Scatter points over the surface
Tab, scatter, Enter. Wire mountain1’s output into scatter1’s input.
Scatter distributes points across the surface it’s given. The output is points on their own with no faces between them, so the viewport goes from solid hills to a cloud of dots sitting on them. The point count is the main parameter here.
Make the thing you’ll copy
Tab, sphere, Enter. Leave this one unwired off to the side.
This is the shape that gets copied onto every scattered point. Scale it down before going any further, a sphere at the default size will be far too big against the grid.
Copy the sphere onto every point
Tab, copy to points, Enter.
This node takes two inputs so it has two dots along its top edge, and the order matters. Input 0 is the
left dot and takes the shape being copied, wire sphere1 into that one. Input 1 is the right dot and
takes the points to copy onto, wire scatter1 into that one.
Copy to Points has no parameters. It reads the position of every point on input 1 and puts a copy of input 0 at each one.
If the inputs are backwards you’ll get a single sphere, or copies of the whole terrain stacked on top of each other. Swap the two links.
Look at it in the viewport
The viewport draws one node at a time, whichever one has its display flag set. The display flag is the
small bar inside the right edge of a node card, click it on copytopoints1.
Left drag orbits, Middle drag pans, Right drag left and right dollies. The Scroll wheel dollies too.
There’s no frame or home key yet, so if the geometry ends up off screen you’ll have to dolly back out manually.
Check the numbers in the spreadsheet
The spreadsheet follows whatever node you’re working on. The sidebar on the left lists every primitive in the result and the table shows the attributes of the one you select. The chips in the top right switch between Points, Vertices, Faces and Primitive.
Leave it on Points. The columns are P.x, P.y and P.z, the three components of @P, which is the
position attribute every point carries. Click through the primitives in the sidebar and you’ll see each
copied sphere at its own position.
Points is the only mode properly filled in right now, the other three are wired up but mostly empty.
What to change next
Go back to scatter1 and change the point count. Everything downstream recooks and you get a new
arrangement without touching the sphere or the terrain. Change Rows on the Grid and the hills
resample under it.
Nodes & the Graph covers what’s happening when a change ripples downward, and Attributes picks up where the spreadsheet left off. If you’ve used Houdini, Coming from Houdini is a faster way in.