Blender | Easy Iron Man 2 - Swinging Sticks Rigid Body + Particle Simulation | EEVEE - 4K TUTORIAL

hey everyone welcome back to the channel i'm arya and lately i've been watching different videos on things like kinetic sculptures and other physics-based artwork and i thought it might be fun to try to replicate one of them in 3d i remember seeing this in iron man 2 and just known as the swinging sticks it also seemed fairly simple to replicate so that's what we're going to do and then of course we're going to add our own little twist to it make sure to like and subscribe and if you're able to make a donation or want to get a copy of the blend file from my original animation head over to my patreon page and sign up to become a member okay let's get started start by opening up a new scene then we're going to select the camera and the light and hit delete next you can select the default cube and we're just going to use this as part of our scene so let's rename this to stand next we can scale this so let's hit s to scale then set to lock only to the z axis then type in 0.3 then we want to scale this on the y axis so s to scale y and type in 3. we just want to add some extra geometry to our stand just so that we've got some smooth edges so hit tab to go into edit mode and there's a lot of ways to do this but today we're just going to add a bevel so if you hold ctrl and hit b then move your mouse you can see that we're starting to get something but you'll notice it's looking really funny it's not really in good proportion so just hit escape then tap to go back into object mode and what we need to do is if i hit n on the keyboard you can see that our scale values aren't in sync so they're just representing the values that we enter to get this shape so we do want to reset our transforms and you'll see in this case we haven't touched any of our location or rotation so we simply need to reset the scale value so make sure to select the stand hold control hit a then you can see here that we can apply the object's transform to its data which will just turn this into the default values for this object and now if we go back into edit mode by hitting tab hold control hit b and then if you move your mouse again you can see that things are looking a little bit better you can also scroll up on your mouse wheel to add extra subdivisions or scrolling down to add less i'm just going to scroll up one time and add one subdivision then click now we can hit tab to go back into object mode right click shade smooth then just to finalize our geometry we can just head over to the modifiers tab click here and add a subdivision surface of two so the next thing we can do is start adding our a frame by hitting shift a mesh and then clicking cylinder now we can scale this so s then hold shift set to lock to those two axes and type in point one then we just want to scale this on this edge so s to scale zed and type in three next we want to just give this a slight rotation so head over to the transform properties hit n on your keyboard make sure you're in the item tab click on the x rotation and type in 25 next we can bring this up by clicking the zed and just dragging then finally we just want to bring this over so in our y location we're going to type in 1.25 right click and shade smooth now we can just quickly duplicate this so hold shift hit d hit escape to leave it in place then to reverse the angle all we need to do is add a negative in front of our y location and our x rotation so that should work just fine you can see that there's a bit of overlapping here i chose to leave it for mine just because it's barely noticeable but if this bothers you feel free to go in and fix this geometry next we can select either of our cylinders and we're just going to duplicate this again so shift d escape then we just want to zero out our x rotation and our y location we also want to scale this a little bit on the z axis so the way i'm going to do that is just to click here and type in 7.5 then let's bring this up so g said and we'll just drag this until our pivot point is about center with the apex of our frame now we do want to leave our pivot point there but bring our geometry down so the way we do that is hit tab to go into edit mode then make sure everything is selected if it's not just hit a then we can hit g to move and zed and just drag this down until our bottom set of vertices is just above our stand if you hit three on the numpad you can go into right orthographic just to see a little better so now tap to go back into object mode then i'm just going to hit one to go to the side view here hit g x and then just bring this out until it's just past the edge of the frame okay so now we just have one more to add let's click one of the original ones just because the pivot point is properly in the center hold shift d then hit escape let's reset our y value to zero but let's set our x to 90. then she said and we can just bring this up we do want to shrink this a bit so i'm going to head over to the transform properties again and under the dimensions i'm going to change the z to 5. we just want to make sure that we offset this a little bit as well so again hit tab to go into edit mode a to make sure everything is selected then hit g y and type in minus 0.3 back into object mode then one on the numpad g x and we'll just bring this out in front the same way we did before and set that in place awesome so now that we've got our basic setup we can start adding our rigid body world which in our case will only be three different objects so let's click that top cylinder here by the way we're going to just rename this to emitter just because this is eventually going to be the thing that emits our particles and it will just be easier for us to find and now just head over to the physics properties and click rigid body let's leave this as active set the mass to 2 and the shape to mesh if you have a slower computer you can set this to convex hull or also cylinder would work next we're going to click on our main cylinder here back into the physics and we'll click rigid body again you can leave all of this default except for the shape which we're going to change to mesh or cylinder if i go back to frame one and hit play you can see that these things just fall the reason for that is because we don't have anything to anchor them in place so let's do that so click on the emitter cylinder shift and then click the other cylinder then head up to the top here where you see object go down to rigid body and click connect now we've got this empty right here that is been turned into a constraint so we just want to move that up just so that it's near our actual pivot point so she said and we'll just bring this up again use one of your orthographic views if that helps this doesn't have to be perfect but it should be as close to the center as possible since we want this to be able to rotate on the center axis we need to switch this from fixed to another option and in this case the thing we want to do is hinge which will lock our rotation only to the z-axis which you see is pointing straight up so we need to change that as well so make sure that you've got the constraint selected we're going to hit r y and you can type in 90. then the final thing we need to do is just make sure that we parent our constraint to one of our objects just so that it follows the movement throughout the animation so one more time make sure that the constraint is selected then shift select our main cylinder hold control hit p and select object if i hit play it still falls because we need to attach our main cylinder so again back to frame one you could turn this into a rigid body and do this but i found this to be a little bit glitchy so let's add one more cylinder by hitting shift a mesh and going to cylinder then we just want to make this nice and small so that it fits here out of sight so roi and 90 to rotate g inside to bring it up then we want to scale this quite a bit so s and type in point one and that should work just fine so what we need to do now is back into the physics we're gonna add a rigid body to our new cylinder this time we want to change the type to passive just so that it stays in place and switch the shape again to either cylinder or mesh finally now we need to connect our main cylinder to our new cylinder so select the main cylinder shift select the new cylinder head up to the left click object all the way down to rigid body and connect because we want to have this rotate we need to go into the physics again and change our type to hinge then just like we did before we need to rotate our constraint so r y and type in 90. since our things are sitting perfectly they may not react to gravity right away so i'm just going to rotate everything just a little bit so just click on the main cylinder type in rx and hit 6 then we just want to do the same for our emitter cylinder so click on that rx in six then we just need to bring our pivot point over so we're gonna hit g and hit set two times which now instead of moving on the global z we can move on the object z axis and just bring this over until it lines up with our constraint back to frame one and then if you hit play you can see immediately that we've got a nice swinging simulation so hopefully you've made it this far and you'll see that if i do hit play that our simulation is working very nicely but it will slow down over time and lose speed whereas the actual swinging sticks sort of has this perpetual motion feeling to it so i did look into it a little bit and this product i does have a battery inside here with a very strong magnet what happens is this has a sensor and once it indicates that it is going slower than it is supposed to it'll add a magnetic charge to boost this and spin it all the way around giving it the appearance of perpetual motion so of course we can do that in 3d as well and get something very close to that effect so back to frame one then shift a and we'll head all the way down to force field and click magnetic g zed just to bring this up slightly just above the stand just so that we can see where it is i try to make sure that we all have the exact same simulation but given the nature of most simulations and the way we're doing it it's not exact so yours may be different but if i give you the basic idea you should be able to figure out what we're doing with this magnet here so the first thing i want to do is just set a base value of something like 1200 which is quite high but that seems to be a good starting value as well we're gonna add a flow of one then for this animation uh 250 frames is a little short so i'm just gonna do this all the way up to a thousand if i was to hit play you'll see that we're going to run into an issue right around 250 frames which is our simulation just stopping so what's going on here is we need to head over to the scene properties open up the rigid body world and this is where we control the length of our rigid body and you can see here that our start and end frame are only set to 250 so let's change this to a thousand so this is looking pretty good as a start but i do want to get this to spin around all the way a few times so the first thing i'm going to try to do is head over to the physics properties make sure that you've got in the magnet selected and we can just try to up the strength to something around 1500 and hit play that's looking pretty good there's a couple little glitches in here and you'll notice that if i just leave that value that it's just gonna start speeding up over time gaining and gaining momentum so what we can do is just add a few keyframes to our magnet just so that we don't have a constant strength the way i did this was sort of just follow the lead of the simulation so hit play and find the spots that you like and dislike i like most of this uh it's not perfect but i do notice that at around frame 400 it starts gaining momentum and it won't slow down after that so i'm gonna go to frame 400 set a keyframe for the strength of our magnet move forward about 15 frames or so and then change the value down to around a thousand and set another keyframe so again what you can do is just simulate to a frame where you start to notice it losing a lot of momentum and that's where you want to add some value again so again this is all looking really good we're getting some nice height but at about this point now we're going to start losing our momentum so around frame 600 i'm going to set a keyframe head forward about 10 frames again and let's set this back up to 1500 and set a new keyframe [Music] [Music] and see now that it gets a nice little push there and it can start spinning a little bit stronger again if it starts getting too fast you just want to make sure that again say around 800 you add a keyframe head forward about 10 frames or so and again set this back down to about a thousand once you've added three or four spots you should have a pretty good simulation so now that we've got this i'm happy i'm going to head over to the scene properties open up the rigid body world and hit bake now you can just scroll to whatever part of the simulation you want to see from and hit play and the whole thing is looking really good so it's looking really natural there's a couple of spots that could use some tweaking but for the most part this is meant to be somewhat random anyway hopefully you're at this point as well and now that we've got our rigid body simulation done we can move on to particles make sure to bake and then save your simulation just so we've got that locked in and now we can click on our emitter cylinder and start adding particles so head over to the particle properties and click this plus symbol for mine i added quite a few particles i had something like 500 000 but i know for some of you that's gonna be way too many so we're just gonna do a hundred thousand and again i know that seems like a lot but just keep in mind that we are doing it over a thousand frames instead of our normal 250 length so we're extending this four times as well we are going to limit the lifetime of our particles in the simulation so that should help as well let's set the end frame to a thousand just so that our particles last the entire time and we want to set our lifetime to 65 and the random to 0.2 then let's just head down a little further let's turn on our rotation and open up our options set this to a random value of your choice just so we can add some extra movement to our particles down to the physics and we'll just add some brownian motion so type in 10 then onto the render tab let's switch this from halo to collection and the reason why we're doing this is because we want to add more than one particle type in point zero two for the size and the random to one we also want to leave our emitter active just because we are gonna use that as an object as well then we need to now create our collection so we're just going to do a little bit of a side track here and create our particles so shift a mesh and click icosphere bring this over so g y and then i'm just going to bring it down just so that we're sure it's out of the way and just so we don't have to come back to it let's just add our materials to our particles as well so head up and click shading to head into the shading tab hit the decimal key just orbit around our particle and since we're gonna add materials to this let's just make sure we have a little bit of lighting so up at the top just turn on the render preview then we're just gonna add some super basic lighting by heading into the shader editor clicking here going into the world and now we'll just create a basic lighting setup so select the background and we'll hit shift d bring this down then shift a and search for mix shader just place it in this line and hook up our additional background click here to change the value to zero and what we want to do is use this as our visible background but use this for our lighting so shift a and we can search for environment texture then hook this up to the color click open the hdri that i am using is in the description so you can click on that then just scroll down and you can select the 1k version we're only using this for lighting so we don't need to have any of these other options it will just take longer to render just click that and download it to your computer then select it and hit open this is a lot brighter than we want it to be so we're just going to change the string to .01 we do need to separate these here but i'm just gonna head up to the render properties first on the right since we're using ev there's always some extras that we want to add so let's add amy and occlusion screen space reflections and screen space refractions while we're here we are also going to be adding bloom so let's just turn that on and set it to 0.1 then almost at the bottom here just open up the film properties and uncheck transparent and now basically what we have here is both of these backgrounds mixing evenly into our shader and coming out so we want to separate those by adding a light pass so shift a search and type in light path select the first option and hook it into the factor then you can just make this smaller and bring it over and now we're getting proper lighting so in the shader editor up on the left here let's just go back into object shading now that we've got our particle we can click new we are going to do three different particles but they're going to be super basic so for our first particle we're just going to click here and add a bit of a color to it something in the orangey red range will work and then we're going to set the metallic to 1 and the roughness down to 0. now we can hit shift d and y just to bring this over then we just want to make a duplicate of our material just so that it doesn't change our first material click on the base color and let's set this all the way down to a dark value let's bring the roughness pretty high say somewhere around 0.6 then one more time shift d and y just to make one more particle and bring it over duplicate our material one more time but we're going to delete this shader and search for an emission shader and hook that up instead we'll set the strength to 25 and the color again to an orangey red now that we've got that we can just quickly go back into flat shading click and select all of these particles then there's two ways to do this you can either right click and go to move to collection or you can just hit m on your keyboard then click new and we want to name this something like particles the name isn't important as long as you remember what it is then click ok if i just show you in the collections here you can see what we did is create a new collection and then dropped all three of these inside i'm going to quickly jump back to layout now if i click back on the emitter and make sure i'm in the particles we can scroll all the way down click on the instance collection and select particles if i was to hit play you can see that they're kind of shooting out everywhere and the reason why this is happening is because they're being affected by our magnets so what we need to do is tell our emitter to only use forces from a specific collection so back to frame one in the particle settings scroll all the way down to the bottom and you'll see something that says effector collection and that's where we need to define which collection we want so let's quickly add a new one by clicking on the scene collection and hitting the plus symbol you can leave this to whatever name you want it doesn't really matter i'm just going to leave it at that then in our effector collection i'm just gonna select collection three then if i hit play one more time you can see that our magnet is no longer affecting our particles just quickly head back into the particle properties one more time and for our gravity we're going to type in point two which will just have our particles hanging here a little bit longer i'm just gonna quickly add one more collection you don't have to do this but i'm just gonna name it constrain then just select both of these constraints and drop it inside just so that things aren't as confusing again you can name all of these as well i'm just gonna leave them for now but it is a good idea just because uh when you do get a larger scene it can be very difficult to figure out which each one of these are i do want to add some forces to our particle system so i'm going to select collection three so that when i add something new it will drop in there and of course we know that our emitter is set to only use forces from this collection so shift a force field and let's click harmonic then we just want to bring this up right into the center because this will matter so i'm going to just bring it right up around our main pivot point then jump into the physics properties we can set the strength eight leave the damping to one and set the rest length to two hit play and you can see now our particles are starting to follow our force i'm going to add another force so shift a force and let's click turbulence make sure that this is in the center this won't matter as much but it will affect it slightly strength 215 size to 0.35 and the flow to 2. this of course will just give our particles a bit of noise and it'll also help push them away from the center save and then hit play and you can see that now they're kind of noisy and it's pushed a little bit further away from the center great and once you've got that you can just click on the emitter one more time and we can bake our particles so head over to the particle properties and again you could add some more of these if you wanted which will help the effect look a little bit nicer like i said mine was set to around five hundred thousand but a hundred thousand should be just fine i'm just going to set mine to 200 000 just to get a little bit more density then open up the cache settings and hit bake awesome so that took me about two minutes and depending on the length of your simulation this could take longer or slower for you now that we've got all that we can just scroll to it to any frame that we like and just see how things are looking then now that we're done all of our simulations all we need to do is add our lighting and materials i'm just going to quickly head back into the shading tab then just turn on the render preview and you can already see that we've got a nice effect so one thing that i'm noticing right away is since our emission particle is so powerful it's kind of overpowering the other ones if i was to zoom in you can see them but i'd rather have a lot more of those than the emission particles so i'm just going to click on the particle system or you can click on the emitter here then if you go into the particle properties you can just scroll all the way down and you'll see an option here called use count so just turn that on and this here represents all of our particles so i know these in order and this one is our emission particle but just make sure that you've got the right ones selected so you can see that i've got mine in order one two and three then what you can do is you can select which particle you want to add more of so i'm gonna select the first particle and set this to something like six or seven then as well with the second one i'm gonna do the same thing now if i was to click away you can already see that there is a lot less so depending on how many particles you're using you may want to add more or less of these so i'm just going to add two or three to the emission particles as well and like i said you can just go through and tweak these which will just add more or less of one of the particles awesome so now let's click on our frame and we can just click new then just add a basic metallic materials so metallic to one and roughness to point 0.2 we want to add the same material to the other side as well so just make sure to name this something that you'll remember i'm just going to do sticks then click here open this and just select sticks click the main cylinder as well and we'll do the same thing sticks then finally we'll do it to our emitter cylinder as well so select that then we'll add that same material select the stand click new and then we'll just bring the base value all the way down and leave the rest the same in my animation as well i had a different color tip on this cylinder here so i'm just going to select it then hit tab to go into edit mode and we just want to add a little extra geometry to the end here so hold ctrl hit r then when you see that guide just click and then we'll drag this all the way down you can zoom in or just hit the decimal key just to zoom in to this end now you want to go into face select mode and select all of these spaces so i'm just going to hit alt and click this to select that edgely then shift and click the end then if i just go into the material properties we've got our sticks material but if i click this plus it will add a new material for us we can click assign new and then add a mission so let's select here click emission set the strength to 25 and the color to blue then back into object mode and now things are starting to look really good so let's add our ground plane shift a mesh and plane i'm just going to scale this up so it's quite large so s and type in 75 i like to offset mine since i know the camera is going to be on this side i'm just going to hit g shift set and just bring my plane over since i'm going to add a wireframe to this we just want to add some subdivision so tap to go into edit mode right click subdivide then open up this little menu and set the number of cuts to 100 back into object mode then we'll just head over to the modifiers click and let's select wireframe you can see that it's looking really funny if i go back into flat shading these are quite large so as always we just need to hit control a and reset our scale by default the wireframe will remove the original geometry so we want to uncheck that so that we've got both our floor and our ridges then we can set the thickness to point one we also just want to bring this down so she said and we'll just bring this down until it's just under our stand i also just uh added some displacement to the geometry so tab to go into edit mode hit one on your keyboard to go into vertex or select here make sure at the top here to turn on proportional editing then you just want to select our vertices hit g and zed and drag this up if you scroll down on the mouse wheel you can see that the sphere of influence will increase then we just want to make sure we've got some varieties so i'm just going to make some larger ones in the back just so that we don't have to really create a background and something like that should work pretty good this is just to get some variety with our lighting and the way our texture looks so i'm happy with that i'm gonna head back into object mode and just before we add our materials uh they're not gonna show up really well just because we don't have really good lighting so let's start adding a few lights i'm going to quickly jump back into layout just to make the screen larger shift a light and select point i just sort of did random placement with these so you can just bring the first one in front like this somewhere directly in front and that should work fine head over to the light properties set the power to 500 and we're gonna set this to a blue color as well we also want to set the radius to one just so that we've got a slightly larger spread then i'm just going to hit 7 to go into top orthographic just to make this simple hit shift d and y just to bring this over hit shift d shift z just to drag this over here then one more time shifty and y just to drag one final one over and for this one we're just going to change the colors so back into the light properties and we'll add an orangey red color and that should work great so let's head back to the shading tab turn on the render preview then we're going to select our plane by the way you'll see that a lot of these things have been dropping into here so what you can do is select all of those then just click and drag these into the main collection this doesn't really matter but it's just to help us keep things more organized so again select the plane and we'll just rename this ground then again make sure it's selected and click new click on the base color and we'll just bring the value all the way down then shift a and search for bump the normal to the normal and set the strength to 0.5 and now we can add our textures so shift a and we're going to search for musgrave select the height and hook it up to the height set the scale to 50 detail to 25 and then we'll just leave the other two the way they are shift a and search for rolling texture then we'll hook the distance into the vector and then we just want to select this here and change this to manhattan we can leave our scale at five but let's bring our random value all the way down to zero then we just need to tell our plane how we want this to display our textures so i'm going to select the voronoi texture and hold ctrl and hit t to add a mapping and texture coordinate node if you don't have this add-on activated you can just go to edit preferences add-ons and then search for node and make sure that node wrangler is turned on then select the object and we'll hook that into the vector instead of generated and of course you'll see that that makes a huge difference then the final thing we need to do is just deal with the roughness so let's add a color ramp by hitting shift a search for color ramp and then we'll just hook our musgrave texture up to the factor then the color into the roughness just to make our stuff a little bit more contrast we're just going to drag this value and bring it all the way over to somewhere in the middle and that's it so now let's head back to the layout tab and we can turn on the render preview here turn off our overlays then i'm just going to set up the camera somewhere in front of our simulation shift a and click camera then hold control alt and hit zero on the numpad you can just use the transform values to set up your camera anyway that you like i also had my focal length set to 35 which doesn't really matter but it just gives you a bit of the same perspective that i had so i'll just zoom that back in and then i also want to add some depth of field so make sure that you've got your camera selected again we can just bring this up to our main collection and then again in the camera properties open up the depth of field settings select a focus object which in this case can just be our emitter then you need to set the f-stop to something like 0.1 or even lower to 0.05 just keeping in mind that the lower you put this the slower your render will be so now you can just find a frame that you like then once you've done that head to the rendering tab if you're using motion blur with evie make sure to go into this and add some more sub steps at least five or eight should work fine render and render image make sure to like and subscribe if you enjoyed this tutorial and again if you're able to support me with a donation make sure to head over to my patreon page and sign up to become a member okay i'll see you soon bye you

Channel: Aria Faith Jones

Views: 3,384

Keywords: simulation, animation, tutorial, particles, howtomake, cgart, cgartist, vfxartist, cycles, render, lighting, eevee, blender, how to make, blender tutorial, blender 2.8, blender 2.9, hdri, easy, beginner, stylized, camera, blender 2.83 tutorial, blender 2.9 tutorial, physics, color, colour, movement, simulate, art, lights, rigid body, rigid body dynamics, rigid body blender, particle simulation blender, particles blender, particles blender 2.8, particles blender 2.9, depth of field, beautiful particles

Id: qGY6CO6LiAM

Length: 34min 41sec (2081 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/bro2017]

Nice work - though I don’t think it was a good film, very weak.

[u/Ariafaithjones]

Iron man 2 Swinging Sticks! 💥💫