2.91 Is Getting Crazy

[Music] i swear to god every time i open up wonder shit's getting more complicated last time we talked about this kind of stuff we were talking about 2.91 updates and we talked about how even then you could convert a mesh into a volume which is the setup i have right now you have a cube and it's being turned into some cloud nonsense actually let me move the cube itself it updates with changes in geometry blah blah blah blah it's pretty cool long story short you can convert meshes into volume but today is getting insane because you can take volumes and you guessed it convert them into meshes so today is the story of taking a mesh converting it into a volume and then going back all in a procedural way that has to do with modifiers and long story short you can take your explosions and turn them into lego blocks and stuff like that so first of all how do we even set something like this up again make sure that you're using 2.91 if you do not it's not going to work and you're going to be like why isn't it working and i'll tell you because you're an idiot so here's what you do we're going to start off with a new project again 2.91 we have some kind of mesh we could actually make it look more like a cloud just so it's more topical and by the way once we once we go over this kind of like dumb little example we're upgrading to houdini explosions so you know yeah just keep that in the back your mind either way what we can do is we can start with a mesh let's just shape that with proportional editing and stuff like that just so it loosely looks vaguely more interesting than a cube you know anything to just get you mildly stimulated there we go so we have a mesh of a cloud so how do we turn this into a volume metric well the technique from before is you shift a volume empty so this is a volume object that has nothing in it uh because that's that's what we chose and we have to give it information to use so modifiers we're going to add in a mesh to volume in other words we're telling empty we're telling blender look at this empty and say what am i trying to say i'm saying take this mesh and convert it into a volume which which mesh damn which mesh this one okay so we took this mesh converted it into a volume because this is a modifier it's completely procedural and with that we can actually stack different kinds of modifiers so we could add in a volume displace this was the idea of adding a 3d displacement uh just so it looks a bit more like a cloud so we're going to use a cloud texture all of this was covered in the previous video you know it's not nothing crazy you could just change settings here and make it a higher resolution so higher voxel counts and we can also make it more dense so you can see what's going on um long story short you have a mesh and you convert it into a volume so now how do we take this a step further we've we've entered kindergarten how do we go to first grade what we do shift a enter not enter add any kind of mesh that you want i'm going to use a plane or a cube actually any of these are going to work because again it's a modifier based effect so let's add in a cube for example with this mesh again independent of what it is you are going to add in a volume to mesh modifier this is the new modifier this is the big deal so volume to mesh in the same way that before we had to select a mesh now we need to select a volume to use so we are going to select this volume right here and you can see that automatically this has created a mesh surrounding the kind of the boundary the outskirts of our volume okay and we do have a couple parameters that we can mess with first of all add activity which is kind of the easier one to think about this is kind of like decimation it kind of takes our mesh and says use less polygons which is a big deal you know if your volume is crazy so here you can see it's very decimated and not at all et cetera so that's adaptivity whereas threshold is basically telling blender how do you want this volume to be converted into a mesh we go to a higher value it's going to go kind of into the interior of the volume because it's looking at different densities and it needs to have a higher density for this to turn into a mesh whereas if we go very small basically any tiny wisp of smoke is going to count okay so think of this as a slider that says what density should i include in the boundary of this mesh right so how do i want to do this and then how much decimation do i want and then of course you can do smooth shading and all that and again the idea behind this why this is so attractive so alluring is because because the whole thing's procedural so if i mess with the original mesh that is converted into a volume that is converted into a mesh you can see it kind of does the whole stack so again there is a question of what is the point of having a mesh you know a volume convert into a mesh and i'll go i'll give you one example of why that is but it does uh work it does exist and it does crash about 90 of the time uh you you have a better chance flipping a coin and then to get blunder to not crash here okay so let's level up with a harder not a harder just a cooler example so from before i said that i had this houdini scene where basically i created an explosion and you're like oh explosions that seems you know kind of hard with all these nodes and whatever long story short i did some stuff in houdini and then i exported it into a cache of vdbs which blender can now import and is considered to be a volume object okay so let's talk about how to do that what i'm going to do is i'm going to add in a volume object this time not an empty but an import vdb because we do have vdb information so we're just going to import all this vdb and you can see boom we have an explosion in blender and yes this has a temperature heat density but a bunch of other things i can't remember so we could render this as an explosion but we are not interested in that what we are interested in today is how to convert this into a mesh so the process is exactly what you'd think you add in any kind of mesh and just approval you will use a plane instead of a cube so again independent of geometry modify or add in a volume to mesh what volume do we want to use we want to use our dank houdini explosion and this is kind of a good way to show that it actually updates very quickly um to changes in volume right you don't have a static mesh this thing updates and because this is part of a modifier stack by the way this is cool just take a moment to appreciate what you're seeing right now i feel like i'm not really you know i'm not i'm not really emphasizing how big of a deal this is but this exists uh because this is a modifier we can actually add in modifiers on top so for example kind of a weird one that you might consider is a remesh modifier so this is just to kind of smooth it out but what i like to do is set it to blocks and now you have depending on you know how many blocks you want you have a kind of blocky based explosion uh you can mess with settings here again to change how this whole thing interacts and create a lego based explosion you could probably also haven't tested this but maybe a wireframe modifier so now you have a wire base explosion that kind of updates procedurally and all this the possibilities indeed are endless well not really you do have a limited number of things you can try but um this is just a cool thing i haven't tested out if i can get shading to carry over from the volume into the mesh i assume not because that sounds very complicated with a lot of uv advection stuff but i do have a tutorial in the pipeline about first of all how to make this explosion in houdini and control different settings and then also how do we maybe turn this into an anime explosion or something like that i haven't thought about it full yet but wow that that is uh interesting looks cool especially when you go to rendered mode and you can see all the lighting interactions and all that it's kind of a way to make actual mesh clouds not you know mesh base clouds but mesh clouds themselves which again you can you know mess around with you can actually displace this volume which i do expect to crash but let's see let's see what happens can i add in some noise to a pre-made houdini simulation it looks like the answer is yes and it does seem to mess with quite a few uh quite a few of the outcomes so this is not working out the way i expected it to so i guess i may as well uh wrap up here anyways i hope you learned something 2.91 is getting crazy this is such a cool way to do an explosion uh 2.91 is getting crazy if you want to access two exclusive tutorials by the way i made one recently about this yoshi 8-bit effect from beginning to end a three-part mini-series that quite frankly goes on for too long it's an hour and a half that's an exclusive tutorial if you're interested in stuff like this and project files i'll upload the vdb sequence for this in behind the scenes all that patreon is the place to do that so go check that out if you want the exclusive tutorials if you want this if you want that or if you're just a big fan of cg matter default cube anyways i hope you enjoyed this tutorial and that's it i'm out of here see you

Channel: Default Cube

Views: 266,084

Keywords: blender, tutorial, 2.91, update, mesh to volume, volume to mesh, modifier, 2.9, volumetrics, eevee, cycles, 3d, cg, cgi, vfx, animation, animated, beginner

Id: e_zA5DGev-4

Length: 8min 32sec (512 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020