Animating Dust Particles in Blender (Eevee)

[Music] hello there in this rather beefy episode I'm going to show you how I'm setting up animated particle systems in blender I've recently put this little animation together to commemorate the closure of Microsoft's mixer streaming service and all the wonderful times that we've had there and I thought it might be nice to put a little animation together in which the robot basically kicks the mixer sign and waits for the plug to be pulled by Microsoft there and in order to make the scene really come alive I've added these wonderful not only bit of background action but also these wonderful particle effects to the scene so they're kind of out of focus and they're going all over the place and we see this effect in video games all the time when this little flies buzzing around lambs and all that and this is all done with blender so the assets are under the robot on the right hand side that is from 3d universe that's an old asset for that studio really I brought him into blender animated him with mixer more blocks and then I've animated the mixer sign that was an SVG that Microsoft provided so I picked the colors from their corporate identity and yes that's how I did that but the particles can also be used for all kinds of other things and there's a very complex process to get this going to set this up but it is kind of nice when once you have it so this is another example of using that so you can have these are how to focus things that just create some kind of a generic animated moving background there so this type of thing is what we're gonna set up today and there's a lot of steps to it I've added chapter points to the description so you can go to rather than splitting this video up into several episodes I've left it all in one episode and you can jump to the chapter points if you wish also patreon supporters of mine will get access to the scene file we're creating today so that will be included for patreon supporters I'm going to put a link in the description to that and I will also provide written instructions to this video so that we all know how that works at had a glance that is pretty much it let's get going with blender 2.8 three I'm going to not actually delete the default queue nah default cube will be will be with us for the whole duration of the scene in fact he's gonna be the star of the show all I'm gonna do is move him up so I'm gonna go and press gz1 and enter and that will put him right on to our floor here and so as I said he's gonna be the center of the show so in principle what will happen is that the cube will be the emitter of the particles they'll be emitted from the cube and the camera is gonna look through the cube so that's perhaps a good way to set to get started to set up the camera the way I wanted that but the camera since it's gonna be 16 by 9 I'm gonna scale the cube up a bit with s and Y and I'm just gonna make it a bit longer and I might also just that's actually that's actually fine that's all we need to do with the 0 on the numpad I can look through my camera and on the View tab if I use this little tick box here lock camera to view I can go and just frame this up to something like that they're all they're about it doesn't have to be absolutely accurate but so that we're basically having a side view of the cube that was that's that's the idea that's what we're gonna that's what we're gonna see so with that setup let's also before we get going let's let's add a bit of light here we're gonna use the default light also not gonna be deleted this time GX we'll just move that over to the kind of in the middle here and then we're gonna use Gy to move that over to the side to about here and with that light selected let's just go turn it into a spotlight and this will give us this kind of volumetric effect as if a light shines through this volumetric fog whatever you want to call it I'm going to turn it around so that it shines directly at the cube so our zet to about here again it doesn't have to be absolutely accurate that's almost we're almost there maybe G wine wood over to here and just make that spotlight a little bit smaller so the size I'll turn the size down so that it's you're just shining at the cube like that there we go that's technically our scene that's all the setups that we need to worry about so we can play with the values with the intensity of the light that's all gonna happen later let's turn I accept let's turn a focus now to cranking these particles out so that all happens on our cube so we can I can I'm gonna leave it cube for now but you can rename that of course or something like emitter or what not I'm gonna leave it cube for now and if we go to the sidebar here with a cube selected there's this little icon it looks like I don't know three little lines coming out of a spot and that is the particle tab currently there's nothing in them I might just make that a bit bigger there's nothing in there if I hit the plus sign I'm gonna set up a particle system and that's great that's all I need to do now we have like thousands of settings here don't be freaked out about them there's a lot that we don't need and only a few of these we do need and those are the ones I'm gonna highlight in this process since we're dealing with animated particles I'm gonna go and turn this into say a 250 frame animation that's the default but right now I only want to see the first 50 frames so that's I'm gonna shorten that animation there press the spacebar to start the animation just so that we can have a look what's happening here and it looks like without doing anything the things already producing some kind of particles that's awesome these are generic so they they are called halos and blender just produces them we can replace them with regular with real geometry of our choice later but for now these are you know these give us an impression of what the particles are going to look like now notice that the particles are not behaving like the ones I've shown you in the beginning these seem to fall down and that's the first thing that we need to that we need to fiddle with and that happens on this long list of things under something called field weights down here if I open that I have the this tab here which is called gravity and that's set to one and that pulls the particles down hence they fall if I set that to zero that's kind of a bit better so nothing's falling down anymore everything's kind of just floating out and that's you know also okay that's interesting but it's also not quite what we want also if the gravity is zero what other force might be invoking this this movement on our particles that is happening under the velocity tab we see a normal of 1 meter per second and that is exactly what generates that movement I'd like to make sure the particles don't move at all with the particle emitter I would just like for the particle limiter to produce them and then I'll introduce something else that makes the particles move so let's set normal to zero as well and that would mean our particles are now frozen in place however what isn't quite working is that I don't see all the particles at once I see them kind of popping into place over a period of time and notice if I put this back to 250 frames now I will see that they will pop into place I kind of move around some disappear some reappear and that is also not what I want I would like all particles to appear at the same time and then I would like for them to just stay there that's what I like I'm gonna press shift shift set actually so that we get rid of the that we go into this some kind of ghost view in which we only see the particles that might be easier to visualize this so what's happening here is that on the top here where we're setting up the particles we've got these these settings here frames start and frame end and that is literally what's happening here my particles are being created from frame 1 to frame 200 and they have a lifetime of 50 frames so I would like for them first of all to have a lifetime of 250 frames I don't want them to disappear at all I would like for them to last as long as my animation is I would also like for them to start on frame 1 but I would like for them to also end on frame 1 so I'd like for them all to appear at frame 1 so let me do that and that is kind of the state I'm looking for here they all happen and that's it and they all last until the end of my animation that is exactly what I wanted all particles and what's perfect number is the number of particles I have so I could reduce that to half the size of the particles or you know - - quite a few the default is a thousand but you can crank that up or down we're gonna get a better impression of how many particles we need when we have our own geometry going so for now I'm going to leave that at a thousand which is just the default okay great let me stop the animation with space put this back to frame 1 and let me go and introduce this this mysterious force that's gonna make our particles wobble now and that is called a turbulence force if I press shift a I go to this bottom thing here that says force field and what we need is indeed a turbulence force so that'll be in the center of the scene our cube is not in the center of the scene is kind of just at the you know rising up from the top so that means if I now press space the force field doesn't seem to have any effect and that is because it needs to be kind of in the middle of our particles oh look at that towards the end it does have an effect but up until that point there's kind of nothing's happening for about whatever 200 frames and then it starts happening so let me go and grab this and move it up with G's that kind of halfway into the cube here there we go and now the frozen in place particles are being moved around although there's one coming through that's crazy grating this is it's kind of going into the direction of what we like if we look through our camera this is what we would see and that is already pretty cool for something that we've just cobbled together but it's a bit too fast for the dust particles I'd like for them to be much slower and much more subtle and that is now not an adjustment we make on the particle emitter that is something an adjustment that we make on the force field here so I might just rename that here and from field I'm gonna call that just turbulence like so and then we know what it is it has a little settings field which is this little circle like a dot with a little circle on the outside that is where we find a couple of settings that are interesting for us I'll go back to the kind of the fall view here there's two things that we should pay attention to one is the strength value and one is the flow value you think perhaps if the particles move too fast maybe we're just gonna go and crank down the strength to something like 0.2 to make it all very subtle but watch what happens then it kind of starts out very slow and that's kind of what we want but as time progresses it looks like things are being a little bit too fast again so it also doesn't quite start add a value that is consistent with the whole movement that I'd like to have so the strength slider I recommend you leave that on one and instead pay attention to the flow slider flow is kind of works the opposite way of how you think it would work like many things do in blender so if you increase the flow the speed of the flow kind of actually reduces which is weird so if I track that up to two then we'll see that the particles seem to float much slower now and also they kind of they don't they don't start slow and then accelerate they kind of keep as slow as I might like them to be too might be just a bit too slow so if I turn that down to about one that's probably more of what I'm looking for here there we go that's already super hypnotic so I can I can totally just watch this all day and be super happy with this without doing anything else with this but that's just me now the real fun begins when we replace these little dots with our own geometry and we'll do that now something that looks more like dust platelets let's go and stop the animation and and just go out of this again and then of course materials as well they're all going to set up that as well but for now let's go replace these generic circles with our own geometry I'm gonna go and make the cube disappear for now and in fact I'm going to make the turn let's disappear as well so that we have a bit of a clearer view port here and I'm gonna create my own particle shift eh it'll be a mesh and I'm gonna choose an icon create your particles from anything you like I go so it works quite well if I go into the Start menu here I'll turn the subdivisions down to one and that makes the geometry you know like and easy that's really what we want I'm also gonna go and press shift-z again so that we get into the solid viewport again and because I don't want this to be in the center of my viewport I'll press G followed by Y and I'll just move that out of the way here just out of the way somewhere there and let's put our best modeler face on I suck at modeling but it does particle I can just about manage so tap into edit mode press a to deselect everything and I'm just gonna go grab this vertex here GZ to pull that down I'll do the same with the bottom vertex here doesn't have to be masterpiece it'll be very small anyway geez set like so and then I'm gonna go toggle this with a and just make the whole thing flatter like a kind of a disc so s zet will scale that along the z-axis and that's kind of you know maybe that's a dust particle I mean you can put any kind of randomization in there you can just grab this guy and it just move that over here it doesn't really matter you can create several particles as well I'm just gonna go and use this one for now and then perhaps we're gonna add four more randomization just to show you the principle I'll add a second one later that I'll make maybe from a cube but for now I'll leave this as it is it's currently called eco sphere I might just call that a particle or perhaps because we're already saying perhaps we're gonna make another particle let me call this one particle one there we go let's bring our cube back and our turbulence and let's see how it can replace all these things with our particle actually maybe before we do that because it's it's easier to see when we're in the in a kind of solid you if we go into the transparent view that would mean we're also gonna see a transparent version of a particle and is gonna look messy so perhaps bear with me here while we quickly set up a material for our cube that might be that might be interesting as well so the material for the cube if I go back into solid view I see the cube I don't really want to see the cube I'd like to if I go into my rendered view version here I still see the cube because the cube has an outside material I don't really want that I I don't want to see the cube I just want to have the cube there so that it can emit particles so I'm an Eevee so that's why my solid view looks the way it looks it looks you know it looks it looks nice it looks real tiny but the principle will also work with cycles but I'll stick with Eevee for now I'm using the default settings in any viewport 16 samples and with my cube selected I'll head over to the materials tab down here and I'll see that the tab that's open already is here the surfaces tab and the surface currently has the principle be SDF shader applied like it has with new objects that you create I don't actually need that so I'm gonna do something really scary that I didn't even know you could do you can remove the whole surface shader from the cube and if you do that there's literally nothing that's being displayed so currently it's just black because we don't see a surface we you know we just see a black thing there what I'm really interested in is adding a volume shader to this and that's the tab right at the bottom here I'll close surface down I don't think I need that anymore and I'll pick and again I didn't know that that was possible you pick a principled volume shader now that is exciting and watch what happens when you do that it looks like the cube has completely disappeared and when we look through it we can now see in the rendered viewport we can now not see the cube anymore we can see straight through it which is awesome we're gonna play with the parameters here later a little bit particularly the density but right now this is exactly what we want notice that this only works in the rendered view so if I go back into the solid view I have my cube comes back because it's just a review of the cube but if we go into the rendered view then it's no longer there I believe the material preview also works here that also works out if you don't want to use the render view you can also use this and you do not see your cube but you see the effect that the cube has and you can also see your particle which is awesome now with the cube still selected let's replace our generic particles with the one that we've made so once again cube selected go back to the particle system and down here I'm going to close some of these things down and mission particularly I'll go over to the render option and here we can see this thing that's now says render as halo so every particle is being rendered as this little white ball there but if we take that drop down here I can also pick an object and that's exciting because that means I can now go and select which object I want the instance object in my case is particle number one and you can probably guess how we're gonna create multiple particles that we've made in this project namely by instead of selecting an object we could also select a collection so if we put several particles in a collection than the whole collection whatever is in the collection will be produced as particles then we might do that later for now this is this is what I like I'll go and look through my camera I'll press play and I'll see that now my own dust particles are being reproduced which is nice they all look exactly the same so that's that's not very you know that's not very realistic so let's go and work on that first of all we can work on the scale if we want to make them a bit smaller or bit bigger we can do that I might just leave that I think the default was at 0.5 so I might might turn this down to 0.2 whoops what's that actually 0.05 was that it yeah there we go so if I go and turn that to 0.02 that's probably more like the particle effects that that if I wanted them to be dust particles that's probably more what I'd what I'd like to see but again they look very uniform so I'm thinking let's apply a bit of randomization to it the first thing we might want to do actually I'm going to leave at 0.05 just so that we can see this better I'll go and take the rotation box here and that if I open that up it will let me pick on the orientation axis it will let me pick something other than velocity hair I'm gonna pick normal and I'll crank up the randomize value so the normal the surface of the normals is now going to be randomized the rotation of the surface normals is now gonna be randomized I can also randomize the face at which this has happened so this is now gonna create it's like a complete randomized thing there which is nice but currently they all have the same scale so that's another element of randomization that I'd like to add there some particles should be larger than others and that is happening I believe under the render option so down here we have the scale and the scaled randomness so the scale that's we've just talked about that but scale randomness is the one that I can crank up and now things are being literally randomized in size so zero means no randomization one means full randomization and this means I can now go ahead and maybe adjust my scale accordingly if I now see things are being you know too small or too big you can you can adjust that as you see fit while we at this stage is also nice idea to have a look at the very top tab here under emission and see if thousand particles is the correct number if you kind of happy with the size and with the with the flow of the whole thing you can then go and just this accordingly so if this is a bit too much you can turn this down to 500 maybe or even something less I'll leave it at a thousand for now because there's another visual effect that will influence the amount of particles we actually see and that is the depth of field depth of field that's a camera effect and that can only be seen in the rendered viewport so I'm gonna go and switch over to that which also lets us see the beautiful volumetric lights that we're getting here now I think we may have to adjust the light to be a little bit further at the top otherwise we've got this we get this dark corner here I might do that right now I'll go and select the light and that was I believe our X was it our X and there we go yeah there we go that's that dark corner gone but also you know if you like something like that introduced feel free to fiddle with the light speaking of light actually there's so many things that come together don't they speaking of light the particles can actually be seen very well in the light and that is because they are currently not really emitting or reflecting any light I mean they're there I can see that and I can see this better if I go into the material preview I can see the particles whizzing around there but if I go into the rendered view port I can't really make them out very well and that is because we might just add a tiny bit of an emission light to the particles that was make him stand out a bit if you want to get creative you can also give several particles different types of light that's how I made this little bouquet effect that you have several types of light in there we're gonna stick with one select the particle and go on to the materials tab and just create a new material I might call that particle material and we don't need the volume shader for that we need the surface shader now which is the principal psdf which is what we want slightly further at the bottom here we can crank up the emission value and the color if we want don't go over the top we don't want it to be completely white I guess but you know something something in the kind of 75% it kind of depends on what you're going for if it's a warmish type scene let's go and make the particles a bit warm as well so not not exactly not a hundred percent color but just give them a tiny bit of a spin depends on what you're going for you could make the light warm you can make it cool kind of depends on the look that you want but the point of the material on the particles that we can now see it a little bit better and now that I do look at the particles I feel they're not as many as I perhaps like them to be so I can go back to my cube here to the particle system and just go and crank up the number of particles that we're doing making it to maybe 500 so we just see them a little bit better that might not be perfect for the final scene I just want to get a bit of a better visualization for the whole thing now if we stop the animation here we can see every particle is in focus and we can even make out the kind of the crooked shape that I've built here they all look very random which is great that's what we want but right now it doesn't look very elegant so no matter if we have the overlays active here or not it doesn't look it doesn't look swish you know if I go and render the scene now it's you know everything is kind of harsh and I'm not getting that soft dreamy look here I'm getting the volumetrics sure but I'm getting you know I'm getting harsh edges and I don't really like to see that so what we can do is introduce a bit of camera depth of field effect here and that is happening when I select my camera under the camera tap down here and as this tick box depth of field and it works really well in evey so right now we're not really focusing on anything I can use this slider here to get my focal distance correct and it while it does work it's it's it's a lot of guesswork here what I'd like to do is to introduce something called a focus helper that's an empty object that I'll place anywhere in the scene kind of in the middle but I can then adjust its position forward or backwards and then ask the camera to look at that for its focal point and that's really nice let's do that introduce whoops introduce maybe go back into the into the material preview actually I'm gonna go into this thing so I can see and I'm going to bring my overlays back to so I can see what I've actually got selected here so I'm gonna go and hit shift a and create an empty any empty will be fine maybe this one here plain access is fine and I'm gonna call this guy instead of empty I'm gonna give him a name of focus help and with that selected I'll go bring him up a little bit much like the force field here focus helper goes kind of in the middle of the cube with then with our camera selected I'll go and ask the camera to focus on the object that I've just created which is the focus helper and now if I go look through the camera and look through the rendered view port again I can see that if I go and grab the focus helper and hit G + X I can move this guy forward or backwards and as I do that I get a kind of a visual indication with the particles when they are out of focus and when they in focus so that helps me determine that it's like I feel like being a focus puller on a film set now but the depth of field effect itself isn't very pronounced and especially if we had a character in our scene you might want to put that focus helper on the character so in the robot scene that I've made that focus helper would be somewhere where the robot is or on the mixer logo or wherever your point of interest lies so we're just using it to get an effect going but if you're combining this with an actual scene then your focus helper would be in a particular place namely where so where we want the actual focus to be to emphasize this effect I'll go and select the camera again and just give it a much wider aperture so the real-life apertures it's it's not exactly like that in 3d sometimes we have to go through extremes to emphasize an effect that we'd like to highlight so 2.8 is a fairly wide aperture but there are lenses real life lenses that have an even wider aperture I believe Stanley Kubrick shot a movie once with lenses that had an f-stop of 0.7 or something which is crazy I didn't even know that existed but I forgot the title of the movie actually but it looks absolutely interesting and he did this all with just candlelight and interior so phenomenal well you can do that so f-stops they kind of go to one and then anything that goes to zero that's almost taking more light in than it's currently in the room it's kind of a weird principle but anyway we can we can use that to advantage because blender calculates it correctly as if I go and set the f-stop to one then I can see that my particles get much more out of focus and the depth of field effect is getting very more a lot more pronounced but I can even go to something like a 0.5 and now you can see everything is kind of soft and dense dreamy that's exactly what we want from this render so if I now go and take my focus help again and hit G and X and move it back and forth you can see how much of a pronounced effect this has on my particles I can I can barely make out what the particles once looked like and if you go to real extremes like this you got some really cool effects here because they are all animated now so if you press space you get this all as a real time animated effect so this is not exactly what we're looking for but if I head over with the focus helper selected start with G and X and I'll go and bring this slightly further back then again you can see that the that the particles are now beginning to look like what I've shown you in the beginning with my mixer animation they're dreamy dust particles and like I said if you want to use this if this is if they're too many particles are they're moving too fast you can go and adjust these values now so in the if you select the cube and head over to the particle settings you can adjust the number of particles with this value so number maybe we'll half that to 250 because in in real life scenes that might not be that much dust around so maybe even something like a hundred would be would be fine if you don't like the way the particles are distributed there's also a way to deal with that so like right now I've got this one guy floating around in the middle here and I don't I'm kind of happy with the overall scene but I'm not so happy with the distribution of these guys that is also switchable by going back into the cube and onto the particle system there's this thing here at the top under mission there's the seed the random seed value that the randomness of these particles is being created with and you can just change that and then the position of all particles is being changed and you can change that as many times as you like until you find something that you're happy with and you can then even bring that back so if I go back to zero now I should see my guy in the middle again that I'd rather get away from so that seed can be adjusted to your needs they can be animated which is awesome I didn't also didn't really want to do that so sorry about that I just wanted to hack in a number here so I could got a couple of pixels to the other side here if you found a seed that works for you I'll pick any any old seed I'll pick number 15 here there's something else I wanted to bring to your attention that happens when you watch the animation slider the the playhead going back and forth so right now it's orange and that is because everything that's orange that has been cached in memory but only in memory if I make an adjustment say to the seed I switch it back to 14 then you can see that the thing that is about to happen has not been cached but the thing that blenders just displayed has been cached so this is something this is blender working out where the particles are gonna be live as it plays it back and once it's done that it remembers where that is but if you were to save the scene and then come back to it later it'll have to do that calculation again it doesn't really remember what it's done there this is only cached in memory but there is a way for us to bake the animation into place so if I wanted to render this out and I come back later and I say hey actually I need frame hundred forty seven 270 again then it would be beneficial if blender wouldn't have to work out where those particles were because they might not be appearing in the same positions so for this I can go over to the cache parameter here and that's again this is on the on the cube under the particle system under cache and here I can ask blender to bake all these particles in and if I do that watch what happens if the color changes yet again to like a darker orange you can even make sure it gets baked too so as soon as you save your file you can bake it and then you can select disk cache it's currently grayed out it's because I haven't saved my file let me go do that real quick this is on one of those things that the hike I wish I knew when I explored this I'll call this particles and I'll say save and now I can see that this is no longer grayed out so I can go and tick that box and take that box and now I can set a compression here if I wanted to but now this is being saved to disk so if I go and I can delete the bag or I can calculate the frame or not I can once I've calculated it it will persist as far as I as far as I know one last thing as promised let's see what how we can make more than one particle appear in our scene let me go back to my solid view here and I'll I'll zoom right out and bring over them bring my overlays back and go to my first particle here there it is let me go and create a second particle and more of that in a similar way and then add it to the particle emitter just so that we know how that works just so that you've seen it I'll go and create a new object maybe I'll create a cube this time I'll go and bring that next to my other particle here I might just go and scale that down a bit and I'll go maybe I'll scale and actually scale that up a little bit and I'll call this one particle 2 there we go and I'll go into edit mode here I just make some amendments to it so perhaps I'm gonna go and squish it down slightly so s zet make it flat and I'll go and bring in the edges a little bit so again nothing nothing fancy just you know one might make might do this and then that G shifts it and perhaps even on the bottom the same thing there just so that we have a slightly different kind of particle here I don't know if it's good or not I can never tell so with this particle also let's go and create a new material on it I'll call it particle 2 or particle 2 mmm material rather and also make sure that's not a capital A they're perfect and perhaps on a particle one I might just go and copy this material and then apply it to my second material there they're gonna look exactly the same paste material but and I have the choice of changing that into something else if I wanted to use a different kind of emission color and turn that into something I don't know more purple or more blue perhaps I don't know we'll see what it looks like so right now in order to add both of these to the same particle emitter I need to have a new collection up here and then put both particles into that collection so let's make that happen under collection I'm gonna right-click and say new collection at the top root level here that creates another collection underneath it if you're in this collection it would create a collection inside a collection I never know how to get Martha so I I'd rather prefer to create new collections on the top root thing here that says scene collection if you right-click there it creates a new root collection I'm sure there's a way I haven't found out how to do that I'm gonna call this collection particles and I'll move both my particles in there so select the first one shift select the second one select em and move it to the particles collection and it doesn't change the position of the particles itself but it will now put them into this particles collection and so now if I go and select my cube again and go to the particle system close all this down again under render instead of render as an object I can go and say render as collection and the collection is now gonna be the particles so with a bit of luck before we go look through our camera again in the rendered viewport we should now see the other particles as well I could just about make the purple ones out here that is kind of nice yes and I've got yellow ones and I've got purple ones and you can have as many particles as you like and put them in that collection make the whole collection bigger smaller add other stuff to it and that is how you get several other types of particles I'm gonna go and render this out and Evie and then we're gonna have a look in my next video how to loop this animation seamlessly watch out for that sorry it's gonna be long but it's one of those things that I thought were really need to take some time over and and explain this authority there's just so many steps to it but once you've done it two or three times it really grows on you and these particle effects they can be used to great effect in both animations and in still images as I said patreon supporters will get full access to the same file if you want to dissect it and have a play with it or generate your own if you have any questions you're more than welcome to ask in the comments if I do know the answer I might even tell you what it is but if I don't I I'm just gonna be open and say hey blender is so complex I really don't know much about it but I've figured this one out I thought I'll share it with you that was it for today I hope you enjoyed it I'll see you in the next episode take care [Music] you

Channel: The WP Guru

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Id: Nt0vADXwPT0

Length: 39min 2sec (2342 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2020