You know how to add some cheap detail to your mesh.

Grab a face, inset it, extrude it in, inset it again, extrude it out.

That’s nice, right?

But what if you inset the face, then inset all those faces, then do the extruding:

That’s way cooler. Instant improvement over the last one.

But what if instead of extruding inward, you extrude outward?

Now we reach the root of the issue: you just destroyed your mesh for some cheap, not-so-good detail.

And that’s where the good news comes in: you can just do all this with geometry nodes. It’ll be

• non-destructive

• easy

• fast

• awesome

• fun to play with

and probably some other things, too, like

• not extremely useful

• but still cool anyway

Read on to see how it’s done:

Today’s Technique

Add a mesh. Then make a new Geometry Nodes setup.

First thing to do is inset all the faces, once. In Geometry Nodes, you do that with the Extrude node: just set the Offset to 0, then use a Scale Elements node to scale the faces down.

That looks like this:

Notice how the Top output is connected to the Selection. That’s so you only scale the top extruded faces, not the whole mesh.

Next you need to inset all those faces—which is a simple matter of duplicating those nodes.

Now you extrude those new faces using the Top output, then use the same nodes again to inset them:

Nearly done—just one last extrude inward:

Now that you know the steps, you can make endless variations of this setup. You can add more extruding or insetting or scaling or anything, just by copying those nodes around. Beware though: Over-extruding can cause issues (like smoke boiling out of your laptop speakers.)

This is the fun bit: model anything you like, and it’ll have automatically generated “detail” as you work.

Feel free to go absolutely wild. Tab into Edit Mode and extrude your mesh beyond all reason:

You could even swirl everything up with Proportional Editing, use a random Boolean to chop half of the mesh off, then take a picture of the whole thing through a camera set to Fisheye. If you do that, you get to call it “art.”

Now feast your eyes on this rhinoceros:

1 Low Poly Pick

Today’s art is by a random artist called bgaj23. Not the easiest name to pronounce, but at least it’s got a bit of character(s).

It’s one of the best low poly animals I’ve ever seen—simply because it’s so accurate. And it’s different than the usual, too (i’ve never seen a rhino in this position before.)

Ears, tail, and eyes are all there, but it still looks simple.

The best part is the way the skin is folded and wrinkled while still being low poly—that’s very difficult to do.

Can't think what to blend?

Try something mushy. A pillow or a great big mushroom.

P.S. if you like fiction read some Voyage. They make free original fiction.

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