Procedural Fish Animation in Blender 3.0 Geometrynodes!
Why Blender Stack Exchange recommends it
Blender Stack Exchange users cite it as the base tutorial for procedural fish swimming, then ask follow-up questions about looping it, applying it to swarms, or fixing performance when extending it.
Recommended by 0 people across 0 different months, 2022 to 2025.
What it is
A roughly 10-minute Blender 3.0 tutorial from Cartesian Caramel showing how to build a swimming fish animation entirely with Geometry Nodes. The motion is driven procedurally rather than with keyframes or armatures.
What people said
Cites SecretKitchen · 2022-02 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “How to do a looped animation with correct rotation using Geometry Nodes?”
Recently I am learning Geometry Nodes. I follow a tutorial and create a swimming fish but I want to loop it. Currently the fish loops correctly in position but once I add rotation node, the head doesn't rotate as expected and whole fish is smashed in frame 125. Using curve can also solve the problem but I want to figure it out with procedural calculation. Is there any method to solve this? Thank you so much!:D [LINK] Node tree: [LINK] File: [LINK] Tutorial I followed: [this video]
Cites Eli Stephens · 2023-02 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Why is viewport unresponsive for several seconds except when changing angles for viewing?”
I have been following the NENGHUO Betta Fish YouTube Tutorial [LINK] to get the fins effect he has and the animation curve which is based on the Cartesian Caramel Youtube Tutorial [this video] . I have only finished the 1st video of the NENGHUO video and now the Blender viewport takes twenty seconds to do anything with the model except changing angles for viewing it in the viewport. I don't know if this is caused by too many faces/vertices or if it's something else in Geometry Nodes. These are my computer stats and I feel like it should work: Processor AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX with Radeon Graphics 3.30 GHz Installed RAM 64.0 GB (63.4 GB usable) System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor P
Cites Stag beetle · 2025-03 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Simulating fish like motion on volume of particles using geometry nodes”
Recently upon viewing the "Procedural Fish Animation in Blender 3.0 Geometrynodes!" tutorial by Cartesian Caramel on youtube (link) [this video] , I got the idea of applying this same movement to a swarm of particles (mesh to volume node-> distribute points in volume -> instance on points), where they would all be moving independently. I feel like this should be easy to do but I'm not very good with geometry nodes. Attached is a file containing his node setup & a nonfunctional implementation of it on a swarm. [LINK] Thanks in advance! (original nodetree from Cartesian Caramel absent in blend file, now amended)