Blender Beginner Particles Tutorial

i actually found this houdini tutorial one day and i liked it so much that i said let's bring it to blender and i made a beginner tutorial out of it because it's surprisingly easy and uses some of the best new functionalities in blender 3.2 which are of course very secret so you have to watch till the end right to make this ball we first are gonna add a ball right so let's delete everything that we have in the scene let's add an ico sphere right we're gonna add some subdivisions for it now the simulation works in a way that we have an emitter in the center and a collision object object as the border so we have already the collision object set up so let's call this one um collision shade it's also smooth with right clicking and let's let's duplicate this with shift d and scale it all the way down so in the center we have an emitter object and i'm also going to name this one emitter now we have the emitter selected and let's go to the particle settings here and let's add the particle system for this emitter so if we play this right we see some things happening like that and this is not very good because well we can't see inside the collision object and it's not reacting to the collision object so for this to work what we need is to first let's make the collision like visible right so or that we can see true by going to viewport display under this object properties here and make this a bound object like we only display the bounds of this object and we also make this a collision object so we go under physics settings and call collision right and now if you play this you see we have i mean it's better it's better than it was before but the particles are way too big right uh so let's select the emitter object because there we have the particle system right you're probably seeing that it gets really hard to like switch between the collision emitter all that stuff so let's do so that we are adding a new window by dragging to this side and we're going to select properties here and let's pin the particle system here now the particle system is always here but if you select like different objects and stuff this object is going to be here right so let's change the size of those by going under viewport display in particle settings and dragging this until they are pretty pretty small i mean it still doesn't look good the reason is that they fall down right and that's because of gravity so under field weights we can turn down the gravity and it turns to something like that right the bounce back i don't like that they move like that so i'm gonna just turn down the velocity the normal velocity to zero right normal velocity means for example if you have like a shape like that then the normals are coming under this direction and this is also the direction into which one we are going to give the speed of the particles right now this is zero and before it was one and this was the reason why they were moving like that but now this is zero and they just appear here and i even don't like that so by setting the emission frame end to also one they all appear on the first frame and this makes the simulation look a bit better at least through my testing and i made quite a few of those if you play nothing happens this is good we can start working on this you give this random like swirly whatever movement to those particles what we need is turbulent force field so a turbulent force field um we had this here right with shift a and if you play this now absolutely nothing for some reason well some strange things have happened well sometimes particles in blender don't work too well so what you can do is just change the number any parameter here do like update this so i just increase the number of particles a bit and now you see it does work and it disappears after a certain time again it disappears because the lifetime of the particles is 50 frames so they don't have time to do anything before they die now i don't like this and you probably also not so let's turn this to 200 right and our timeline has the time span of 250 frames so i'm going to decrease this to 200 frames so let's see how this works right now if we play this it does something like that you know it looks more interesting i think but it still is not very nicely visible so what you can do is to increase the number of particles so let's put 50 000 here as you see it doesn't look exactly nice i mean this is a big flat like a pancake or something like that and we need more like more detail here so how do we add this well we have this turbulent force field selected we can go to its physics properties now the turbulent force field is basically a noise in the world space right it gives particles directions so for example if the particle like most gets the direction okay i'm gonna move like up then after a certain time i'm gonna move down then i'm gonna move up like again or maybe back but now if you change the size of the turbulent force field it's gonna like get those directions much much much quicker which means we're gonna get more detail out of our uh force field so let's change the size to 0.2 go back to the first frame with shift left arrow and let's play this again well you see now this is definitely more detailed there are things that are missing here and one of these things is that first of course those particles are bouncing back from the side here and they're doing this like very aggressively which means they're going to do this like forever so the energy doesn't get lost and this kinda looks a bit bad and gets really messy if you play this a bit more i mean they it gets pretty pretty random here and just a big mess so uh to help to solve this problem what we can take here is the absorption which means uh the force gets absorbed after uh collision objects so we enable this and also we are going to enable some flow for about two now flow is basically just air resistance so the particles when you get the force they don't move like forever but they move a certain time and then they slow down and now you see the flow has been enabled and it looks you know i i can understand that the particles have a really hard time moving through the air and this is not what we want i mean it works but it just is a bit too weak so now the strength of the force field doesn't have any power to actually push doesn't have any strength to actually push them through the dense air so we're gonna increase this to five and you see it's gonna be a lot lot lot better does look for about the same as it was before but we don't see the true effect of this flow yet because we are having so big particles right now so let's take the viewer display even more down and you see right if this is one millimeter we can really start to understand these nice patterns that appear here in the center i played the simulation until the end and you see it looks i mean it looks okay but the houdini one has actually like a like a small like cage or like this little like thin film of particles around itself and that's this is something we can do with uh stickiness so if you have the collision selected and we go under the physics settings we can basically um increase the stickiness to 10 so the particles get sticked very much quite a lot and let's also increase the permeability to like maybe five percent so some of the particles get through the object and form some interesting patterns i think even maybe six percent might be okay and if you now play this again you can see that we have this kind of like a thin film around the thing and we also have some things in the air um around the flow and stuff so this is something pretty pretty nice now what we have to do is to get to the final simulation so no okay i'm having some speaking problems so how is this gonna work right so the final simulation we will do it like that we're gonna create one simulation with a million particles right and we're gonna create then uh three different like a bit different versions of it and we're gonna layer them together with geometry notes so this is gonna be pretty exciting right these are i believe called wedges in houdini like different versions of the same system let's add one million particles here and move to the first frame when you do this and let's also save our file before we do this and let's add one million particles like that and press play now this will take a certain time so i'm gonna make a little pause i'm gonna go away and when this is done i'm gonna come back right now we could actually make a sponsor break instead i think you heard that we are gonna use geometry notes to make them look better now if you hear geometry notes and you're gonna like freak out because of them i understand you it can be complicated but i think our sponsor might help you which is skillshare right so on skillshare i have a course on geometry notes this class will teach you the fundamentals behind geometry notes and once you're finished there is a whole world of classes on skillshare waiting for you about graphic design character design concept art i use it to learn creative things i'd like to know more about such as youtube storytelling by thomas the hair and sometimes completely new things as well i'm pretty sure this is the best learning platform for all sorts of creative people and you can access all of this for free because the first 1 000 people they use the link in the description will get the one month free trial of skillshare see you there so the simulation is ready this is the first version of the simulation as you see it looks pretty interesting right now what i'm gonna do is that i'm gonna select the emitter right and i'm gonna go to file um export alembic and export this to like let's make a folder like called wedges version a dot abc select only selected objects which is the emitter right make sure export particles is selected and anything else can be the same and press export so it has exported and the file size is 2.8 gigabytes which is completely normal for one million particles and now we're gonna make the second which which means we're gonna go to the first frame uh select the turbulent force field and press double r and just move it like to a very different location like rotation i mean and change the size a little bit to like point for example one uh eight zero point uh one eight and the flow to for example 2.2 and the strength to i mean for example 4.9 we just randomized the parameters a little bit and now it's just time to rebake the simulation so now the second version is ready and we do the exact same thing we select the emitter object right make sure it is selected and we go to export alembic and under which is we make this which b dot abc right like that and particles everything like that we export it all right now that the two wedges are done let's go to import alembic under wedges let's import the first one into our scene let's delete the cube and also now if you play this you see we have some black things flying around which are our particles but instead of a particle we have one vertex which is how alembic imports particles now let's delete the sphere here we don't need this and let's also import the second alembic which is the lambic version b ah let's put this to like somewhere here it's frame and delete the sphere also now this is our simulation does this look good no so how do you make this better uh well now there are two versions like if you have vendor 3.3 or 3.2 i'm going to use 3.3 because this allows me to i get motion blur while rendering the simulation which is really really good let's add a new tab here right and let's switch to geometry notator and let's also rename our first one to a and our second one do d and now let's add a random object to the scene and let's hide those a and b things like for example this can be a monkey i mean doesn't matter too much and now if you have blender 3.3 you can do so that you're gonna convert this to a point cloud object and obviously this monkey has turned into points and this is very important right because there is a huge difference between a point and a vertex in blender logic but i'm going to explain this in a minute first let's add a set of geometry notes here right disconnect this monkey from the output right and we don't have any more monkey we're even going to delete the input so what is the point of having this monkey well now we can drag in the a and the b simulations right and if you for example put the a into the group output we can see the simulation is here right put the b did output we see the b b version of the simulation right we join those together right join geometry and we join the simulations together and output them at the same time now this is pretty nice and all but this is exactly the same thing that we had before so why is this better well now we can do so that we had a mesh two points node points these are now points so what is the difference between a point and a vertex if you now render using cycles if you render vertices you don't see absolutely anything make them points right and this creates an infinite resolution sphere on each of those points i mean this is not a polygon sphere so it doesn't use any vram or stuff it is very efficient and very quick unlike most of particle tutorials you probably have seen so far which use real spheres or like some cones or stuff on those things which is very inefficient and very slow so we are going to use those spheres here which is the only way because we have like two million particles here i mean these are a bit too big so let's put the radius to like 0.01 for now but the problem is it doesn't have a nice amount of detail in my opinion you see i mean what is that is this some kind of a nice professional looking simulation no of course not so what we're going to do is that we're going to add a set position now then we're going to like how to say this aim this now the thing that you do with trees you know when they are messy i don't know what the word is but basically we can do so that to connect the noise texture into the offset and we can basically make this all very noisy now of course this is a very bad look and we have also a larger problem which is the fact that you know when i enable the set position with m key you know this shifts up right on all the axises exactly 0.5 what is the reason well the noise texture has a range from 0 to 1 so the average is 0.5 which means it's going to move up on all the accesses by 0.5 which is literally i say this every tutorial so it's like a little mantra i'm saying all the time so we're gonna subtract 0.5 from it and now this doesn't move up anymore unlike without the subtraction it does move right it's not a huge deal but you know it's nice to do things the correct way and now it's just time to like change the scale to something that is actually reasonable to point something is okay but it's a bit too strong so what i can do is i can add another vector math here and change this to scale and scale this vector to like down by two and now we have more detail here it's the question of adding the material now uh let's do so that we had a set a material in the end here right and let's select the material that you already have in the scene and everybody has in the scene which is the material and let's go do to shader editor right and let's select the material that we had here the material which will be called like orb or something like that and the nodes are here we don't need the principle bsdf we only need the emission shader which is also very efficient to render so this is going to be like the efficiency master class here right so if you render this right now what you see it's white like it's it's pretty bad so i'm gonna make the world a dark it doesn't change that's because i have scene world turned off but i'm gonna turn this on right i'm also gonna turn off the overlays so now this is just a big white blob here i don't like this too much well the reason is that the spheres are too large obviously i mean this doesn't look like it too nice of a particle simulation so let's go do geometry notes for a moment and let's turn the radius down to 0.0 let's call this two millimeters like that well now this is what i'm talking about right this does look definitely better than it was before and it looks very smoky and nice and really high quality in my opinion let's go to the last frame of our simulation and render this right this is our orb looks pretty good or even right now without any materials right but we are gonna make this a lot better so the first thing i want to change is the color of the sphere right you can change the color here is this going to look nice no we need a gradient so how do we get the gradient from the center of this orb to the edge well for that we have a thing called texture coordinates right which are going to give us object coordinates so what are the object coordinates they're basically just telling us in which quadrant do the points lie from the center of the object right from this little yellow dot here this is where the quadrant center will be and this just happens to be the world origin also but if i move this object for example i mean this moves around of course so we can use this center point and this information that we have to calculate how far away is each point from the center using the vector math right so length this gives us a value for each point how far it is from the center so this means the points on the edge are going to be much much much brighter than the ones in the center but we don't see too much of an effect here and even if i add a color ramp right which usually which usually is added to add some contrast i mean it doesn't do too much maybe in the center you can see like there is something changing here but this is very little the reason is this color amp here only operates on the range of zero to one but our sphere is uh 10.8 to something so i mean we have to divide our range with 10 to get this to one again right so let's divide this or it was maybe 11 something like that and now let's see how the color ramp works if we drag them like that well you see it does work just until the end of the thing and now we can change the colors using this ramp so i'm going to put the mission afterwards this is how the nodes are currently looking i tend to choose something yellow or at least five times i've been practicing this tutorial so something like that i think and also something green so this can be this can be cool i think right and you can also make sure the saturation is maybe a little bit lower in center and the cool trick is that you can use hsv interpolation what is this hue saturation and value right so you don't see any difference right now but for example if i change this to i don't know like red or is this one you see it doesn't interpolate like linearly but it does it through the color wheel so for example uh if i have something really opposite you see we do have some color color gradients happening here instead of this pouring rgb so keep this in mind you can get some pretty cool results with that but i think this looks okay for now it doesn't look too good right but the reason is the strength of the mission is very very smart let's maybe use like maybe 20 and i think the points might be a bit too large so i'm gonna go to geometry node editor and i'm gonna make the points twice as small with a one millimeter i think this already looks a bit better than it was before now what i want to do is to make the edges of the sphere more transparent than the center of this sphere and that's because i just want to get the focus of your eye more in the center which is basically how all great artworks work they have more color more brightness more everything in the center or in the point of interest so we can mix between for example a transparent shader a transparent psdf and an emission shader so if i turn the mix shader value to zero we only get emission if it is one we get only transparency so white value means transparency and black value zero means emission so now i'm going to use the exact same division thing here gradient from the center to control this so as you remember black means emission in our case so i'm gonna increase this to like maybe that center right i'm gonna plug this into the mix shader and now this is a bit maybe too strong in my opinion so i'm going to switch this also to ease to make this a bit more like smooth maybe turn this white area down to 0.5 so this isn't as strong of a like loss of energy there this is before this is after i think this adds more like eyeballs to the center of this thing and i also want to make this stronger in the center and i can use the exact same chlorine technique for this one except this time there will be some math involved as you see this is something i can use to change the strength right so if i want to make this like very weak in center well i can do this like that i want to make it strong in center and weak at the edges something like that and now if i plug this into the mission this will be a disaster because uh i mean this is very very weak right now the reason is that our current strength is 20 and this one here oh sorry this one here outputs uh zero to one so let's add a math note and let's multiply this by at least 20 can be more doesn't matter but just a big number right that matches the one here and let's plug this here right now now this is of course i mean it gets strong in the center but very weak in the edges i don't like this so much i'm going to make the edges like 0.5 so they actually have some strength but not as much as they had before so this was the first result and this is the process result i think this one looks quite a bit better but now we can do so that um we also add a hue saturation node here so that we can for example change the hue to something that we like more for example i like maybe yeah i think this is a pretty cool result for this little easy simulation that we did now it's time to render this out so go to cycle settings right and enable motion blur with the shutter of 0.5 so this is the final result and if you want to get the project file and the alembics this is on patreon together with a tutorial about how to create effects like that so see on patreon check this out some nice stuff there and see you next time

Channel: Bad Normals

Views: 128,540

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Id: CrOboutVHH8

Length: 22min 27sec (1347 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2022