5 More Useful Art Tips for Blender!

hi everyone in this video i'm going to show you some more of my favorite tips and tricks for blender we did this a couple of videos ago as well and you seem to find it quite useful basically what i'm doing is i'm collecting up some of my favorite tips and tricks and time stamping them in videos so they can act as a good reference for people so in this video we're going to take a look at the skin modifier the hard surface frame mode as i call it which is my favorite modifier stack combination for getting smooth hard surfaces that's appeared in a lot of my other videos we're going to take a look at randomizing the color values of lights using python so even if you have no code experience that should be simple enough in showing you how to access random values using code then i'm going to show you how to access edge data in the shader editor this is for cycles so you can get masks for your different materials around the edges of objects and then we're going to take a look at hiding emissive objects from your scene again in cycles but before we jump in this video is sponsored by nvidia and pc specialist they're working together under an initiative called nvidia studio which is where they're working together to design products for creative professionals if you take a look at the link in the description you'll see a page on the pc specialist website which outlines how nvidia technology helps to enhance these creative applications and you'll also see a list of nvidia's recommended specs if you want to get your hand on a machine that's guaranteed to make use of the nvidia gpus so thank you to nvidia and pc specialist for sponsoring this video now let's get into it so the skin modifier is something that i've used for several of my projects in the epoc one in the epoch breakdown video i mentioned that i used it for getting these emissive floating pieces of geometry now if you don't know what a skin modifier does it takes an edge in between two vertices and it creates geometry around that edge and it starts off in a very cubic way so if i disable the subdivision surface modifier here you can see that it's quite a cubic shape but it's got smooth shading enabled if i disable that you can see that it's very blocky once you have the shape as you can see here you can smooth it down using a subdivision surface modifier one thing that's really cool about this is that if you have these points and you drag new ones out you can try and reconnect them with the original structure and it will automatically interpret the connection point so it means you can very quickly and easily build up new pathways and have them automatically connect together which means you can get some really interesting shapes going now i like this i think it's really cool for doing hard surface smooth organic styled shapes for framing and this is kind of related to the next tip that we'll get into as well which is about the hard surface frame mode as i call it but another useful thing you can do with this is have it snapped to a mesh so basically you can see here that i've got it kind of growing around the sphere but if you want to do this you want to make sure that the snapping mode at the top here is set to face and then if we go into the edit mode for this it's sometimes a bit hard to see the vertices inside of the shape but if i press e to drag a new one out and then hold ctrl it's going to try and put it on the point under the cursor which in this case is the sphere so if i click then press e and hold ctrl again e and control in control and continue doing that i can draw the shape around the surface of the mesh so with relatively little editing effort this is a way you can build up interesting mesh structures either in thin air or around the surface of a mesh and again like i said i use this for doing emissive floating geometry in the epoch animated short you could use curves for this but like i said i like the way that the skin modifier tries to reconnect to itself as well at these connection points just by using individual vertices now if i rotate this lighting object around here you can see that i can get some really cool different effects going so that's quite fun to play with but one extra thing to know about the skin modifier is that if you take a point and press ctrl a and then move the cursor away and the closer in it's going to affect the influence of the skin modifier on that point and what i mean by that is you can basically just make the points thicker or thinner so you can get a lot of control over the shape of a mesh just by using a few vertices and a couple of modifiers okay so moving on the hard surface frame mode which i'm sure a lot of people watching this are probably sick of hearing about because i mentioned it in so many of my videos but it's basically just a combination of a few modifiers the subsurface the solidify and the bevel to get these very smooth hard surface shapes and if i go into the rounded view here you can see how it reacts to the lighting because i have a principal bsdf shader applied with a low roughness value now i love this because i love how tight and sharp we can make things while maintaining a nice looking beveled edge if i go into the solid view and take a look at this in the edit mode you can see that it's basically just simple vertices again making up a complex and very dynamic object and say if i take two vertices here i can press e and try and drag them out and it's going to try and interpret where to create this movement shape so i can scale this down and keep adding extra shapes here rotate and maybe even twist them around as well because you can get nice twisting shapes using this and continue doing this and going around so it's very versatile very dynamic for creating angular hard surface frame shapes now again because this is using subdivision surface it means that we can tighten things up as much as we like so it's compatible with traditional modeling methods if i press ctrl r to make a new edge loop here and then click and drag this down you see that we're going to tighten up the end here now you might want to be careful not to put it all the way to the end because you'll get some really squash geometry but you can basically see how we can add edge loops to tighten things as we like them another thing to keep in mind here is that the subdivision surface modifier at the top of the modifier stack is going to control the overall smoothing of the traditional planar mesh before it's solidified so it's useful having that to a somewhat high value however it is also quite a good idea sometimes adding a subdivision surface at the end of the modifier stack once the shape is being created just to smoothen off the bevels and make it look pristine so if i do that now by adding another subdivision surface you can see that it really tightens up the end there so i just want to make the viewports the same as the renders and the other really cool thing about this is it really tightens up the shading around the bevel as well so if i turn it off we can see the original object with the shading being slightly incorrect here as you can see it kind of darkens and then becomes lighter but then if i turn on the final sub div it really tightens up those shading effects so if i go into the rendered view now it seems like a perfectly smooth and round and well shaded hard surface object so as you can see here on the left i use this for some of the original biogen artwork for these ornate hard surface elements i like calling them at the bottom here i'm basically creating this i don't know what to call it like a lattice structure but it's plating the decorator neck area and fills in the space and again because it's just basic vertices you can get really intricate with creating all these different connection points all right so moving on please don't run away if you're afraid of code because you can just copy me here but in this tip i'm going to show you how you can randomize the colors of different lights around your scene by using python so if you take a look at my outliner here you see we've got a few area lights in this scene and if i go into the solid view turn on the overlays i've actually got them hidden at the moment that's another tip as well i can throw in another sneaky one here if you go into the overlay drop down here at the top and then if you see extras if we take that on and off we can actually hide all these extra lights and the cameras as well you can see that we have the wireframe layouts here for those so if you want to hide those from your view if they're getting a bit in the way even in the rendered view you can actually just hide them up here basically you can see that i've got all these different lights going around the scene and they have different colors and then if i go into the rendered view here hover over my text editor and press alt and p to run the script every time i do it we're going to get a different lighting layout that's quite an interesting one so basically if you don't know what kind of lighting you want you can just rapidly prototype different styles by using a little script like this so the way you'll do it is by opening up the text editor which can be found under scripting and then text editor then you want to press the button for making a new text object and then you can just start typing import bpy basically just says like we want to use the blender python api but to be able to get random numbers using python we need to import a few functions which are basically collections of code which you can call repeatedly from modules which are essentially just collections of functions so libraries of useful things you can do so you want to type in from random so from the module that contains all the functions for doing random things import uniform and basically uniform is the word used to get a random floating point number so basically a decimal number why is that important because when we're dealing with color rgb values you see that the value goes between zero and one so this is a decimal value so like 0.375 for example so if you take a look at this code here it looks quite complex we've got all these words and dots but it's actually quite simple and we're not actually going to type it out we're just going to copy and paste it from elsewhere in blender which i'll show you how to do in a minute but basically all it's saying is inside of the blend file inside of the data we're going to look for the lights given by the name here area.001 like up here area.001 we're going to take a look at the color for that light and the red value and give it a random decimal value so doing that for the red the green and the blue values for area 1 same for the area 2 light and area 3 lights in principle it's quite simple but how do you know what to write down well if you're going to edit preferences and then under the interface section you'll see under tool tips there's a tick box called python tooltips and basically what this does is if you hover over any value in blender you'll see a little bit of grey text which tells you exactly what to write in python to access that value and one thing you can do here is right click and then copy full data path so if we click that and then if i pasted that into our text here this is the data path we've just copied bpy.data.lights area.003 because we had 003 selected dot color so the way we know what to write is by literally copying it from the value in the interface so if i wanted to change the blue value of this now i would type in dot b and then give it a random decimal value like zero point something you know whatever now for this uniform function we basically provide it with two values representing the minimum and the maximum value that it can be so between zero and one just like we have here in the rgb between zero and one so now that i have that written out for every one of my area lights we can just press alt p or alternatively go to text and run script and it's going to randomize the color of the lights so that's where you can write a little script just to randomize the light colors in your scene now of course there's loads of other stuff you can do with python we could loop through all the lights in the scene and randomize the colors for each of them without having to write all this out individually but i'm going to keep it simple for this tip because this is not a python video one thing i will demonstrate as well is that it doesn't just have to be color values like this if i take the scale for this object so i've got the sphere selected got the scale right click copy full data path paste that in here for the scale it's different because the x y and z values are represented by numbers instead so zero one and two so if i give this a random value between zero and one again but it's going to be a different one for each of them when i run this now it's going to randomize the different axis scale so you see that the sphere is changing shape as we're running the script now that's if i'm doing it for each of them individually but if i wanted to have it scale as a whole so rather than distorting i could write something like new scale equals uniform 0 1 and then just give new scale to each of them so that way they're all using the same random number so if i do this now it's going to be changing size but keeping the original uniform shape of the sphere and if you wanted to use whole numbers instead of decimal points you would use the function rand int instead of uniform oh and i know some people might ask about the shader nodes for this object as well so i'm just going to quickly show that on the screen so you can copy that if you like go ahead take a screenshot do whatever you like because we're going to move on to getting the edge data in the shader nodes okay so to get the edges of objects in these shader nodes you basically need to use the bevel node however this requires using quite a few more nodes than using the ambient occlusion node as i showed you in the previous tips video but you can see those nodes here now what gets put into this multiply value node is essentially going to be the radius that we want to get for the edges so if i scrub that down you can see that it's tightening around the edges so the lower the value here the tighter that edge mask is going to be if i bring that back up see that we're getting more and more now this control radius is basically just a value that we can multiply by our original radius one to control where we want the mask to be you can set this to a different value as well and like change the value down here it's up to you how you do this but this is just the default values that i like to have so we have this radius being plugged in and we take the normal output from the geometry node a little tip here is that if you have only one thing being used from a node you can hide all the other parameters by pressing control and h because sometimes it's annoying having these massive nodes floating around before these values aren't being used so if you press ctrl h you can just keep it nice and compact and another little tip as well is you can press h to hide those values it's the equivalent of pressing the arrow up here so plugging the normal output of the geometry node into the bevel node along with the radius we can also change the sample value which is going to give us a more definitive edge but i'm going to leave that at nine for now now i don't completely understand the math of this because i'm not a very mass conscious person i just understand what it does visually but we then pass the normal output of the bevel node into a vector math node set to the dot product mode and then we combine that with the original normal app with the geometry so basically just to construct this we would go to the vector math node go to the drop down choose dot product then the bevel in the first one normal in the second one and then we're going to take that out and do something with it now if you took the output of the dot product by itself that should give us the edge but it's a bit hard to see because we need to restrict the values one way you could do this is by taking the color ramp passing the dot product in and then bringing the color down and then bringing the black all the way up and you can see that we're getting the edge there but the math node set to greater than can essentially do the same thing it's the equivalent of using the black handle of the ramp and tightening these values so we have this set to 0.990 which is all the way up basically the equivalent of taking this black candle and pushing it all the way well far to the right there so i'm going to get rid of that ramp node and plug this straight in and then we can see the edges here now all of this is a little bit tedious to do manually every time you want to get the edges so i compacted it into my own custom gauges node and if you take a look inside of this this is basically how i've set it up so it's the same setup but i basically made the radius and input value and i've also added an invert input value and essentially what that would do is let me swap the mask from a white on black to a black on white so that'll be useful for building up different types of shader effects then from here for example i could start blending things together so if i will take a texture coordinate node i'll just try and do this quickly so voronoi texture object in there mix rgb edges here let's put the color in there plug that in you can see that we're now getting the voronoi only on the areas without the edges and then maybe i can change this color to something else so we'll get like yellow for like gold and do something funky with that so that's how you can get the edge data and use it for masking purposes in the shader editor i'm sure there are some very clever people out there that have much more efficient ways of getting the edge also just to show about this node group here is that if i change this infer value it automatically swaps around where the voronoi is being placed so that gives me the immediate control to swap the effect here okay so for our last tip we're going to talk about hiding emissive objects in cycles now if you've watched a substantial number of my videos in the past you know that i love using emissive objects in cycles i just think the lighting is so reactive and cool but sometimes you want to have lighting like this which is providing consistent lighting across the entire object or character in this case but it's very ungainly and weird and it just looks really annoying floating there in the 3d scene so it's a very useful object for lighting and we can rotate it around and get all different kinds of effects and also change the color very easily but i just don't want it there if you hide in the viewport that's not good enough because the lighting disappears so what can we do well if you go down into the object properties then under visibility you'll see ray visibility and if you weren't using a volume then just turning off camera would be good enough because that would still leave the lighting affecting the object here but because i have a world volume active we can still see it kind of hovering there which we don't want and you might think okay we'll turn off the volume scatter but that by itself is not good enough either because we can still see it affecting the volume but what we also need to do is turn off the diffuse value and that's because the volume contains diffuse information as well and then by doing that we finally have our object hiding with the world volume still active while the lighting is affecting the character so if i have this selected i could still move it around without it affecting the scene and it's completely invisible so that's a way you can hide emissive lighting objects from the scene while maintaining their lighting effect on the objects okay so i'm going to sneak one more tip in here as you know this video is sponsored by nvidia and pc specialist and of course nvidia is behind such exciting technology as the cuda and optics render devices powered by the rt and tensor cores helping to speed up rendering by accelerating processes with the gpu so the tip here is if you have a compatible gpu don't forget to enable a gpu accelerated render device in blender the ai assisted denoising in particular is very cool i use that to help me visualize scenes with a lot of bounced lighting but if you take a look at this render comparison you'll see that this render took 45.8 seconds using the optics render device followed by one minute 17.64 seconds for cuda which is not too far behind and then trailing in last is the non-gpu acceleration of what is known as the none option or just cpu coming in at 17 minutes 10.77 seconds which is very far behind anyway of course if you take a look at the link in the description you will find a page on the pc specialist website we can learn more about in video studio which is an initiative where nvidia are working together with other companies to design products for creative professionals on there you'll also be able to take a look at nvidia's recommended specs for a wide range of budgets if you wanted to get your hands on a machine that's guaranteed to make use of the nvidia gpus if you've watched my recent videos you know they've sent me a new computer which i've nicknamed the render beast the performance improvements on this are insane and if you want to get your hands on your own machine then just check the link below so thanks to nvidia and pc specialist for sponsoring this video hopefully you found the tips useful so thanks for watching everyone stay safe and i will see you next time you

Channel: Curtis Holt

Views: 11,558

Keywords: blender, useful, tips, tutorial, art, tricks, skin, hard surface, emissive, cycles, edge, bevel

Id: YyxirS699Zs

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021