Raspberries using Geometry Nodes

So I really wanted to use geometry nodes to create raspberries in Blender.  I think the results are pretty good, especially considering that you can scale the detail.  In other words, I can spend more time putting in more detail in the fruitlet mesh to get a better overall raspberry result.  Likewise, if I need less detail, I can use a simpler fruitlet to get results that are “good enough”.

If you haven’t already watched it, I’ve created a video that dives into the details on YouTube(link below):

I’ve decided to provide the sample raspberry in a .blend file for anyone to try out.  I’d love to see your results.  Post on Twitter or Instagram and tag me so I can check it out.

The raspberry object in the .blend file is “slightly” different from the version shown in the video.  Specifically, the sample raspberry contains an additional material for the “inside” of the raspberry.  To keep the video length reasonable, I’ve omitted that part.  If you are not showing the inside, you don’t have to worry about it at all.

Download it here.

Retrospective

I feel that I’m not getting the most of the shader setup and I’ll admit, I’m not 100% satisfied with the result. While it does look ok, I think it could be better.

• For the material portion, I had to try a lot of combinations without fully understanding why it rendered the way it did.  I feel that once I get a better grasp of the subsurface settings, I can do some fine tuning.
• The material is very finicky to the lighting conditions of the scene. I can’t just pop in my “raspberry fruitlet” material and have it work in all situations.  I seem to always have to adjust it slightly for each scene. 
• I know I can do a better job at modeling the inside of the raspberries.  I just didn’t have the time and the renders for which I need the berries did not need to show the inside.  I do want to address this, the stem, and leaves at a later date.

Conclusion

I’m pretty happy with the result. With tweaking, they look pretty realistic and far better than any other fully procedural raspberries I’ve seen online. I’ll probably continue to improve the techniques as I need to use raspberries quite frequently in my renders, so I’ll probably post an update sometime in the future.