Abstract Text Animation in Geometry Nodes & Eevee (Blender Tutorial)

how's it going guys so in today's tutorial we're going to be making this text animation here in geometry notes it's really fun it's really cool it's a bit of a hybrid process and i really love the animation uh but we'll get into that right after this quick shout out welcome to real time materials a collection of customizable procedural materials compatible with eevee and cycles with over six years of experience i have created an add-on currently containing 240 materials across 14 surface categories this add-on will speed up your workflow allowing you to stay creative while maximizing your artistic output you might be thinking what about image textures image textures are easy to set up but don't give you any control real-time materials are loaded with custom properties giving you the freedom to change roughness color and all kinds of patterns you can change the shape of wood the direction of cloth weave and the size of scratches among many other parameters even if you already know how to make procedural materials imagine the time you will save if you could apply those materials in one easy click all right so this is the project file that we are going to be creating here and if we go here to the render this is how we're looking and we also have some really cool compositing at the end to really give it some spies a little bit of noise i love noise so it gets a little bit noisy there um really spreads out down here and if you want to grab this exact project file you can get it on patreon if you're already on patreon it's available now you can hit the description if you want to join but let's go ahead and just get a new file here and show you how to make this all right so we are in a blank document we are at we are using blender 3.2.1 so regular geometry node stuff so first off let's go ahead and start our text we need two pieces of text so first shift a get some text now we'll go over here and uh we'll go ahead and make both of those here in the center we do want to center everything out and then we're going to be using this font right here i'm going to link it in the description you can use whatever font you want this one just in my opinion looked the best i loved it and so i'm going to go ahead hit tab and then in all caps but you write whatever word you want it it is not i mean it's totally flexible you can write whatever whatever word you want i'm falling over my words today so here in the font go ahead and pick the font you want i'm going to go ahead and find so this one's called techno over so i'm going to go ahead and just double click that but if you go ahead and click this button here it just brings up all the fonts on your computer and if you if that doesn't work just go ahead online type in whatever font you want pick a free one and be able you'll be able to go desktop wherever you save it and select it so i'm just going to go ahead and stick with this font now i'm going to hit g and move it over we need one more piece of text so i'm just going ahead and hit shift d and get another one now where these are placed doesn't really matter as long as they're out of the way of the geometry node setup that we'll do later so go ahead and select this one and i don't know if i showed you that shift d duplicates it now go back over here to the settings and on fill mode do none and then right over here geometry hold down shift to just give you just kind of a smooth motion here and just give it a little bit of thickness so that depth is going to make it like a neon sign so that's what we want and make it as thick as you want this is really up to your preference in your design now we have these two pieces now before we get into that i am aware that you can do text and geometry nodes um i found it quicker to just make the text here and then put it into geometry so now that rather than using the strings i believe they're called um sometimes it's impractical to just build everything 100 geometry nodes even though i understand that's more flexible so that's that's my reasoning there but if you love geometry nodes you can do it all in geometry nodes if you want so i'm going to go ahead and get just a plane we're going to go here to geometry nodes i'm going to delete this window i'm going to click new we're just going to go ahead and delete this and then what we what you do is right up here in the outliner just click and drag and bring that text straight into here and now you have that so now we have text 001 here and then bring the other text into the geometry notes section so before we use those let's go ahead and get a mesh line so we'll get a mesh line and we'll plug that straight into the geometry and that's going to be essentially our array modifier if you've used the array before it allows you to have a bunch because there are um basically points so you have 10 points here and what we'll do is we'll get an instance on points because we want to be able to instance these objects onto this line with with all those 10 points that are available here so we'll do we'll type in shift a search instance on points and then now it disappears so what you'll do is take the geometry of this object info node which again brings that text in here and plug it into instance and now you have that text and now you have that text instanced on this line now they're way too far apart so what you'll do is you go to this mesh line tool and on the z just bring it down i'll hit the period key to go down here now you can just bring it down and make them as close as you want this is totally up to your design and your preference now what we want to do is we'll go ahead and take this instance on points node and we'll shift d and we'll just duplicate it we do need to get a join geometry node plug the instance here and then plug the geometry node into the instance and then of course use the mesh line as your points and now it fills it out so now you have this wireframe here and the fill here and of course they're both editable you can change the text at any point you can see how that is reactive so it's really cool and you still have that flexibility over here unless you of course apply geometry uh now on that count we do want this boy to be real tall so let's make them tall boom really cool really tall so we need to uh displace the mesh line so that these actually you know move around right now it's just boring and straight so what i'm going to do is i'm going to hold down shift right click and join one string so we can apply one node and it affects everything over here so what we're going to do is get a set position node and this is the node you want to use if you want to displace geometry in geometry nodes now let's go get a combine xyz so combine that's rgb we need to get a combined xyz plug the vector into the offset and then um let's go ahead and get it color ramp you guys know i love a color ramp and plug that into the x that's what that's the that's going to be the axis that we're going to displace the mesh line and then let's get a good old noise texture let's go and make this 4d so that we can actually animate this thing and plug the factor into the color ramp now we have this so if you play with your w it's going to animate it now aesthetically looking at the the viewport i always like to make it look a little bit better so if you go up here click on cavity click on outline and click on shadow and then you can also move your shadow and that's just going to make this a little bit easier to look at so now you can kind of see it better get a better idea what's going on i'm going to go ahead and bring my scale to 1. actually maybe bring my scale to two that's better and then what you can do to exaggerate the displacement which is pretty cool now but what you can do is bring those color ramps in and that's gonna exaggerate that if you play with the w this is the animation and it's just so weird and i'm just a big fan of weird and then you know you can play with your detail and kind of makes a little bit crazier you can play with your roughness to make everything just go kind of berserk so it's just like a noise texture if you're used to note node based shading um you know you kind of have a good idea what's going on here so color ramp's a little too dramatic there we go i think this is probably appropriate and animates just enough now if you bring your detail to zero you get this which is really bizarre so i kind of like the value of two maybe a little bit more and i think that gives you just enough detail to really play with this whole craziness so now we have that what we could do now is just go ahead and animate this now now it's probably a good time to save so i'm going to call this uh all right title it whatever you want but that'll save you in case something goes bad all right so now we're going to go ahead and loop the animation so we can actually animate this guy of course in a loop so bring your w to zero go to your preferences and make sure your default interpolation is set to linear here in the animation section sorry went a little too fast there so go to the animation section put your default interpolation to linear if you're ever doing looping animations this is going to be the killer if you just have it at the default bezier it's not going to loop make sure you're linear so let's go ahead and i'm going to go bring this up for more space let's get this noise texture and just duplicate it so that it is exact to this one it needs to be exact now let's get a mix rgb what we're doing now is the kind of rigorous process that it takes to loop noise textures so i'm just going to go ahead and bring my factor all the way to zero so here in the w um you know let's see how how reactive is it something like that so i'm going to go ahead right over here where it has a plus icon and bring it up and go ahead and get a timeline so we definitely want a timeline now hovering over here hit the back arrow to go to frame 0 right here hit i and then we'll go to the very end and let's go ahead and scroll and then let's give it a value of 3. let's see how well that does hit i now that you're at the very end of your timeline go ahead with this w at zero hit i now remember this is three so when we go back and go back to frame zero we'll do negative three just like that hit i and then staying at frame 0 right here on this mix rgb hit i go to the end and just slide it over and then hit i again so now we have a looping animation if you want to see if it loops seamlessly go to the very end and there we go we have a seamless loop and then of course if you change any settings here in the noise texture make sure the exact same changes are applied on both uh we want them to be exact everything else within this node tree can be changed and it will still loop so now we have our animation so now let's go ahead and get a material so there are basically two pieces of geometry that create this of course we have this object and this object now the end here so what we need to do so this line represents one of the objects this line represents the other object so let me see which one is it okay so this one down here is the one that fills it out that's going to be a black material this wireframe is going to be the one that glows so so let's go ahead and get a set material node and then we'll get that material here and then let's go ahead and duplicate this and we'll get another material and click new and then we'll get zero zero two so material zero zero two let's just go ahead and make that base color black bring the specular down so nothing reflects and then material 001 i'm just going to double click it and call it glow so we don't mess it up that is going to be our glowing material now let's go ahead and hop on over to shading to finish this off and shade it so let's go ahead and just go to the eevee render engine which is the cycles so let's go over here to evie and turn on your bloom that's super important alright so we have the glow material right up here you when it's selected that's gonna be slot one for me so i'm gonna go ahead and delete this guy search em for emission plug that there let's go ahead and get a color ramp plug the color into the color and let's get three colors here so we're going to start here with r with over red i'm just calling it r because we're sliding that over for the r and then for the b right here i mean sorry g let's do g just keep the order right and then we'll do this right here which is going to be the b for blue pure blue so now we have these three colors let's go ahead and get a gradient texture plug the color into the color i'm going to keep it linear so now you can see it's doing this with the node wrangler add-on enabled go ahead and hit hit ctrl t and then we'll get that object coordinate and do that there so now it looks like this what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead shift a and get an empty right here plain axis and i'm going to hit g and move it here that plane is going to direct the gradient material because it's hard to really see it if you're using the mapping node so go here to the object and click that empty and then right here you're going to to the empty and just rotate it just like that 90 degrees and then you can of course hit g and move it up so there you go and of course if you want to kind of stretch out that material you can stretch it out here on the scale like this so there we go that looks that looks pretty good and then of course let's get that brightness going a little bit all right so now we have a glowing text animation click on the world icon and bring it to black shift a get a camera and then just kind of aim your your viewport wherever you kind of want it that camera to be and then hit ctrl alt zero that'll snap that camera to v you can see that that outline let's go here in the camera settings right over here so click on the camera outline click on this we're gonna go to orthographic that's really gonna give you this really cool look and then zoom in with your orthographic scale so you can really have this interesting look now if you don't want to see this down here really breaks the illusion for you which i really don't want to see it you can go to your viewport display and bring however you pronounce that word bring it over and then you can go ahead and hit g move that camera down and we now have if i hit the space bar and press play this really look this really cool looking material i mean you know effect so one last thing before we leave we animated the uh color to look really cool what we did was within the materials hit hue we've got a hue saturation node and if you play with your hue you'll notice kind of does this really cool thing and that's because you're going from zero to one and you'll notice zero looks exactly like one which says if you animate it it will loop so i'm gonna go ahead and bring up a timeline and then uh we're gonna go here and get goodness there we go get a timeline so let's go ahead and animate that go back to frame zero now when i originally did this animating it from zero to one was too slow so i animated it from zero to three so if you use one of those one two three four five like you know don't do like 5.1 that won't loop so you're using one of those main numbers forget what you call that in math but let's go ahead and hover over here hit i and then go to the very end and just type three and if you notice the color doesn't move you know that's going to loop hit i again now if we press play look how cool that is now it's not glowing enough so what we want to do is go here to our ev settings and the thing is i don't want to make it brighter because then we lose color so notice that now this is pretty good it's not quite as volatile so you can probably just leave it but if you don't want to make it brighter you can actually go to the bloom settings and bring up your intensity and so this is point one you can do like point five and really go crazy with it it doesn't really matter so i'll save like 0.3 and then you can bring in that radius um but that is all up to your creativity and your design so just to show you some some control there but there we have it now one more thing before we go i do kind of want to increase the strength of the displacement because it's just not quite enough for me i want it to be more so let's bring in that color ramp there we go now it's nuts and then we can maybe bring the detail on both nodes down to one there we go that's a much more interesting animation let me bring that that back there we go look how cool that is now last thing we need to do is some compositing so i'm going to go ahead and render this image we're here let's go here to compositing click use nodes shift a search get a viewer bring this down here and then i'm going to bring this over hit control right click so that everything we put right here is going to go into the composite and the viewer so that these composites will show up in your animation so let's go ahead and get a lens distortion node and then bring up that to sport dispersion pretty hefty really however you want because we're just going for style it's insane it looks cool then i'm going to click jitter and that's going to give us some noise in the animation as well which i'm just a big fan of noise and that's it that's pretty much it and one more bit of color if you want to add some more color here go to your world bring it up just a little bit and then pick a color something like that now you have a little bit extra color when you hit the render button you are going to have a pretty sick animation let me show you how to render it i mean how to show you how to export it and we will be done so let's go here go to the little printer icon pick your resolution right here 24 frames a second if you like that right here pick where you want to save it then go to ffmpeg video we're using ev so i'm not worried about a png sequence here it shouldn't crash and then right here on encoding go to mp4 and then on the output quality perceptually lossless render render animation and then just let it cycle through all your frames with that being said there you go i hope you guys enjoyed this i'm honestly really proud of this design and i had a lot of fun making it but with that being said i will see you in the next tutorial [Music] you

Channel: Ducky 3D

Views: 58,503

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Id: XKnEJEpG57g

Length: 18min 44sec (1124 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 24 2022