Abstract Animation Loop using Geometry Nodes & Eevee (Blender Tutorial)

[Music] how's it going guys so in today's tutorial we're going to be learning how to make this loop here using a little bit of geometry nodes having some fun with some shader nodes and creating something really really cool before we get into that if you are interested in learning more about how to make motion graphics how to create loops i have a full course designed for beginners to show you all in one place how you can make stunning animation loops motion graphics for whatever you want if you want to check that out and learn more about that it is linked in the description now let's get into the tutorial so here is the full scene of what we're going to be making it's really cool and pretty easy some pretty basic steps here with everything we're touching all right so the first thing we're going to need here is a plane and i'm just going to hit s5 control a apply scale we want it to be a little bit bigger than the default scale just to give us something to work with now i'm going to hit tab right click and subdivide it and i'm going to subdivide it i believe by 30 yeah 30 looks right about what we're kind of trying to go for here so what we're going to do is first displace this plane so i'm going to hit the little wrench icon here for our modifiers and add in a displacement so we're going to do that click new click this little icon here that's where you can access your textures i'm going to click image or movie and go here to clouds clouds is my favorite one it's very simple easy to kind of understand if you're trying to just add some elevation changes to your model now we want to be able to animate this displacement so i'm gonna hit shift a we're gonna get an empty and add plain access i've done this a bunch of times on the channel it's very useful super versatile trick go back to your modifiers and then go from coordinates from local here to objects for those of you who've never played with your coordinates there's actually one called global and what's really cool about that is if you hit g and move it around it's that global texture it's playing with so you can have some fun with that if you want i'm going to go here to object which is going to allow us to select our empty and the empty is going to control the displacement so if i just hit r twice on my keyboard you can actually see how this kind of works i'm just moving my camera i mean my my mouse around so conceptually this is how we're gonna make our pieces move and do cool things now that that's out of the way i'm gonna hit shift a go to the mesh and grab a cube i'm gonna hit g just to move it out of the way i'm gonna hit the period key so we can zoom in on here we're gonna model this really quick so what i wanna do is add a modifier and get a bevel modifier bring my amount pretty close and then give myself like six maybe five segments it's really up to you and how sharp you want your bevel to be so i'm gonna hit tab here go up here to the face like select this face and i'm gonna hit i what the i is going to do is inset it then i'm going to hit e to extrude and we're going to extrude it upwards i'm going to hit i one more time to bring it in and i'm going to hit e and extrude it downwards and what's really nice about this is the bevel stays true so we get this nice little model so this is going to be in a sense our particle ever since geometry nodes came to blender i've actually been kind of replacing it with the particle system because i really enjoy it a lot more control and i love playing with nodes so that's kind of what we're doing here so let's click on the plane and right up here we're going to click on the geometry nodes workspace i'm going to kill this page here and then i'm going to go and click new shift a and i'm going to search up instance so we're going to get point instance plop it right there object and let's go ahead and pick that cube so now we have our cube all over here it's not that cool looking what we want to do is get a random node so this attribute randomize here is going to give us some random scaling now if you don't know much about attributes you don't really need to know a lot about them to use this node just know okay if i want to play with the scale i'm going to type in scale if i want to play with my position i'm going to type in position they're pretty easy default attributes so we're going to type in scale i'm going to hit enter and then right here replace right here on float we're going to use vector vector is going to give us way more control so if we click on vector it's going to give us more variation already and we get more control over the xyz scale so you can play with the scale here you can play with the scale there you can play with the scale here and you can really kind of play with it to your heart's desire i'm actually going to leave it at its default because i think it looks pretty good already i'm going to click on the plane and go here to my displacement and just scale up my displacement a little bit and then we can just actually go ahead and animate this right now so i'm gonna go here and i'm gonna click on my empty go to your edit preferences here on animation make sure your default interpolation is set to linear that's gonna make this a perfect seamless loop otherwise it's gonna slow down and speed up at the beginning of the ending of your scene so hit the back arrow hovering over your timeline to go to frames here that's super important and then we're going to go ahead and animate the y x or z rotation of our empty so you're going to click on your empty and then you're going to click on this little yellow box that's going to be our transform settings so i'm going to go ahead and right click here go to the very end to make this a seamless loop we're going to do 360 degrees rotation and at a hundred i mean 250 frames a second we get a really really cool animation to start with now we need to go through and start shading it and lighting it so i'm going to go ahead and click on my cube we're going to click shading here and we're going to start shading i'm going to close these windows i called it pages i'm going to know because i could remember the word it's not a page it's a window we're going to go ahead and make this metallic and then we're going to take my base column bring it down here to the middle shift a get a color ramp so we're going to go ahead and make a material i've made a couple of times here on the channel it's one of my favorites to make ever it's really fun and it's very techy so we're going to take go here and hit shift d on this color ramp we're going to make two of them and then we're going to go ahead and get a noise texture noise texture now if you're not very good at nodes that's okay just follow along it's a pretty simple setup so get this noise texture hit ctrl t now if that didn't work for you go to the add-ons in your preferences and enable the node wrangler add-on it comes with pointer by default we're going to use the object coordinate here and then i'm going to go here shift a search get a voronoi texture and we're going to switch ellucidian here to manhattan plug the vector into the vector and we're going to plug these guys into their corresponding color ramps here use the color of the voronoi plug in there we're going to get a mix rgb so we can combine these two now if none of this is making sense i'll explain it once we plug all these here together color one color two and plug all of this into the roughness so now we have this what i'm going to do is bring my my factor over here so i just see the noise texture i'm gonna bring the noise texture here bring my detail all the way up bring the roughness up a little bit and bring this color ramp in so now we can actually have some fun with these reflections and it looks really nice and then what we can do here if we watch the texture if we bring this mix in it starts to reveal that voronoi pattern so now you have some rough voronoi and it looks really cool and techy and awesome it's one of my favorite things to do now i'm going to go ahead and highlight all these guys and hit g to move them out of the way i'm going to go ahead and these two color amps are really big so we're going to bring them up i'm going to go ahead and get a color and hit shift d on this one and plug it into the emission socket and we want a layer weight so plug this layer weight straight into here and we're going to use fresnel so i'm going to go ahead and pick the color that i want the glowing emission to be which is kind of an orange and then what we can do is take this blend and bring it so it's super subtle now before we kind of mess with this let's click on the camera icon let's click on the camera icon here and go from cycles to ev that's what we're going to be rendering this in and then just turn on all these little check marks on your screen space reflections turn off half res trace trace precision bring it all the way up and we're going to have some really nice reflections with this new setting let's bring this emission strength up and then we'll bring that blend even farther down we want to be a very subtle reflection here so we'll say 0.01 look at that it's really cool and very subtle it's a way to kind of fake some lighting and add something more interesting the last thing i want to do here for this particular material is get a bump node so shift a b u m bump node we'll plug the normal into the normal and what i want to do is just take the color of this voronoi and plug it into the height what that's going to do is just add some detail here on the surface of our material to really just pull this together and make it look really really cool now that we have that down we're going to go back here to layout we're going to the final render button here and just see what we're working with the world brightness needs to be brought all the way to gray now we have this boring setup let's go ahead and get our camera shift a camera and kind of point your scene however you want it to look ctrl alt zero snap it to view and i'm gonna hit the g kind of move it around maybe g middle click and move it out let's see how this is looking now we have something that's already really really cool what i want to do now is get a light get a point light i'm going to hit g to kind of move it up and bring it over here so something like that you can really place it wherever you want to place it and then i'm going to go ahead and bring that power to 1500 1500 on the scale i mean on the power and then bring the radius high just like that so now we have almost this very flat sunlight kind of look here and then we're going to go ahead and change the color of it to kind of the orange to complement what we already are working with here and now we have this working with for us what i'd like to do now is get in a plane so get a plane here and then i'm gonna go bring this over here bring this up and then i'm gonna hit s5 and then it's not going to fill it up completely we want to fill it up all the way here ctrl a apply the scale i'm going to hit tab right click subdivide i'm going to subdivide it pretty heavily something like this probably will work and then i'm going to go ahead and scale it up some more so it fills up that camera i'm going to add in a modifier add modifier wireframe so now that we have our wireframe let's go ahead and shade this wireframe so go here shading hit zero and then we're gonna go to the render view here so turn off these views click new i'm gonna delete the principled and we're going to get in a mix shader so we're going to make some transparency and emission plug the shader to the surface we're going to get a our transparent node and we're going to get an emission node plug both of those into the shader doesn't really matter the order here bring this up we're going to go ahead and get a color ramp plug the color amp straight into the factor and we're going to get a noise texture noise texture here plug the factor into the color ramp and then if we just play with this color ramp for some of you maybe you'll need to bring the white in instead of the black whatever works for you just kind of bring that in now we can get the color i want to use a nice green a really nice bright green something like that that's going to look cool now you'll notice this isn't transparent this part where it's black we want that to be transparent and it's not doing that so what we have to do is click on the shading button here go here to our settings and blend mode to alpha blend now we have transparency just like magic and then we just have to bring that strength up some more we'll go ahead and bring the detail down and then what i want to do here is on the noise texture hit ctrl t to add that texture setup because what i want to do here is animate the texture like this on the rotation that's how we actually animate it that's why we ended up doing that i'm gonna go to the camera just for me because i hate seeing all of the stuff i just want to see the scene if you click on the camera green camera icon on this right here now we can see only what we're working with and that's what i really want to see here on my point light i actually want to bring it toward the green that's kind of the look i want to go with here and then on the cube texture let's go ahead and bring that layer weight brightness really right so let's bring that emission strength up just like that kind of playing with it like there so we'll bring it down kind of play with my camera angle something like that and you can even bring this color ramp in if it's too much so we'll leave it as this click on the camera again i'm going to go ahead and get some depth of field so click on the green green camera icon click on depth of field bring that f-stop really far down so that we can play with this focus distance and then bring the f stop back up to get a more wide focus here so now we have this i'm going to go ahead and bring my focal length make it wider i kind of want to see a little bit more like that click on the camera icon go to color management and we're going to go here on the look and bring it to high contrast so we can get a really cool look there and then now let's go ahead the last thing we need to do is actually animate this wireframe so we'll go back to shading i'm going to bring this down i'm going to bring this up click on this and we'll go here to timeline and then we just need to rotate it so i'm going to click the back arrow to go to frame zero of course clicking on plain zero zero one for me which is this wireframe i hit the period key to kind of snap these to view and we're just gonna go ahead and animate the y so right click insert keyframe go to the very end 360 to make that a perfect loop insert and then now we have this really really cool really stunning loop that you can have a lot of fun with change it up make it a live wallpaper throw it through wallpaper engine whatever you want to do here this is how you create this really cool animation thank you guys for watching and again if you want to learn a lot more about loops i have that motion graphics course you can learn about that check it out in the description thank you guys for watching and i will see you in the next tutorial

Channel: Ducky 3D

Views: 108,038

Keywords:

Id: 0DVRWpbQOI8

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021