Blender | How to make a Sci-Fi Magic Ball / Orb - Particle Simulation | 4K TUTORIAL

hey everyone this is zarya welcome back to my channel this is a very exciting week the channel finally reached 10 000 subscribers and not only that it's already past 11 000 which is so amazing so thank you to everybody who is supporting me also i decided to finally upgrade my microphone so hopefully things will be sounding a little bit better for the tutorials make sure to like and subscribe and also if you can head over to my patreon page and support me with a donation okay let's create this particle simulation so the first thing we need to do is open up a new scene and let's just select and delete everything next we'll hit shift a mesh and we're gonna click uv sphere right click and shade smooth next we're going to add a couple of modifiers so just over on the right let's click the modifiers tab click here and the first thing we're going to add is a solidify and set the thickness to 0.02 if i turn on the x-ray toggle you can see that there is an extra edge inside now which represents the thickness and the main reason we're adding this is because normally glass has a thickness to it which also affects the refraction of the light so this is going to make it look a little bit more realistic then we can click here and let's add a subdivision surface and we can set that to one then while we have the sphere selected let's head over to the physics properties and click collision leave this to default and this will just contain our particles once we add them so the next thing we need to do is add our emitter so the way we're going to do that is just duplicate our spheres so hold shift hit d and then you can either just click or hit escape since this is just going to be our emitter we want to remove all the things we just added to the original sphere so click here to remove the collision then back to the modifier properties and we can just remove both of these now we've just got our basic sphere we're just going to scale this down so i'm going to hit n just to bring up the transform settings click and drag to select all of our scale options and type in .92 and now we can move on to adding particles so just over on the right let's click the particle properties and then click the plus to add a new particle system now depending on your system you can fluctuate a little bit with this number if you're on a laptop you're going to want to go to something like 50 000 then for a mid-level system go somewhere around 80 and if you've got something a little bit more powerful you can set this all the way up to 125 000 which was about uh what my final simulation was i did 500 frames so i had double this amount which also was a little bit slower because i did create the lifetime to last the entire animation so eventually i did have 250 000 particles in my scene just keep that in mind that as you go through the simulation it is going to take longer to calculate just because we are keeping the particles in the entire time for this simulation i'm going to set mine to 100 000 just for a little bit of speed then like i said let's set the start and end frame to match our animation length and as well we're going to set our lifetime to 250. open up the source and this isn't super important but we're just going to change this to random just so we thought we got a little bit more of a random dispersion scroll down a little bit further and we're just going to add some rotation again this can just be a random rotation which if you have followed my other particle tutorials which just help us to get some nice reflections with the light scroll down a little bit further and we're going to leave this to newtonian but we're going to add some motion so let's type in 10 for the brownian one for the drag and one for the damp as well moving on we can now go to the render tab here so this is where we pick what we're going to connect to our particles so let's click here and go to object then we're going to change the scale to .008 and 0.5 for the random we are going to hide the emitter so the best thing to do is just name this up here just so that we're not getting confused we can also name this one glass and now if we ever need to find our emitter and it's hidden in our viewport you can just select here head back down and now we need to actually create an object to instance so just something super simple shift a mesh ecosphere then we want to have a little less subdivision so just click this menu and set the subdivisions to 1. now that we've got our particle we can just bring this out of the way so jesus move said and i'm just gonna bring mine down you can bring it anywhere in the scene you want i just bring it down because usually there is some kind of ground plane select our emitter head all the way back down then for the object that we want to instance we're just going to click here and click ecosphere let's also rename that particle select our emitter back down just a couple more things with this particle system so we'll open up the viewport display uncheck show emitter just so that we don't have our icosphere showing and it's just our particles finally we want to set our gravity to zero and now is a good time to save then head back to frame one and if you hit play you can see that we've just got our particles inside our sphere we're just going to add our center object which will also act as a collision object so shift a mesh and then we'll click icosphere this time we'll set the subdivisions back to two hit s to scale and type in .25 next head over to the modifiers tab here click and we can add a subdivision surface of two right click and shade smooth then we want to add a collision to this so into the physics properties click collision and because we want our particles to stick to our object let's add some damping and friction so we can set those both to one so let's just quickly add some animation to that so again make sure you're on frame one select the ecosphere let's rename this to center then right click and insert a keyframe for the rotation values and now if i was to go to the final frame there would be a huge amount of lag so what we can do is just head up here to the restriction toggles and we'll add these two toggles here then for the emitter we can just click this one in the center and what this will do is we've got no calculation of our particles so we'll be able to move around a little bit quicker so my suggestion is to turn this off for now head to the final frame in the animation i'm just gonna set these to roughly what i have my values set which was about there right click and insert a new keyframe hover over the timeline hit t and select linear and basically what that's doing if i quickly jump into the graph editor click normalize as you can see now that instead of having a gradual start and end we have uneven motion throughout if i just quickly throw on the wire frame you can see now that our center is spinning the next thing we want to do is hit shift a force field and we're going to go to turbulence the turbulence will just help our particles get some nice noisy motion to them let's set the strength to 250 the size 2.5 and the flow to 5. and the size of course is just the size of our noise this is obviously of how strong our turbulence will be and the flow just helps to slow things down and it also tends to bring the particles a little bit more in uniform we do want to add a couple more things so let's just go down to the bottom here we're gonna add a minimum and maximum distance and basically this is just the fall off for our force effect so it won't really affect anything outside of this range here so we'll set the minimum to 0.6 and the maximum to two so basically you'll have our main effects here and it'll sort of just fall off then now that we have that we do want to add some extra motion to our turbulence force just so that we don't have uh too much of a static motion with our particles make sure that you're on frame one then we'll add keyframes to our location by hovering over this and hitting the i key and as well as the rotation so hover over this and hit i you can also hover in the 3d viewport hit i and select location and rotation as well then i'm just gonna head all the way to the end again and just set our values again so something like that and insert a keyframe you'll notice that i am always adding one negative value that's just because i found it rotates a little bit more uniform if you've got one of these set to a negative value then back to frame one and now we need to add some noise to our location so let's head up to the left when you see a little plus symbol click and drag to add a new window click here and we're gonna go into the graph editor make sure to hit normalize if you haven't already just to bring everything into focus then we can open this up now we're gonna work with our location values so let's hover in here hit n then open the modifiers we have our x location selected so let's click here and add a noise then we're going to set this to 11.5 and the strength to 0.5 we want to do this for all of our locations so let's click here so we can copy our modifier select the y location and click here to paste then let's just change the phase now select the zed and let's do the same thing paste and change the phase now we're done with this window so i'm just going to close it so right click join and click over here i'm going to quickly bring back the particles just to show you where we're at and now you'll see that we're starting to get some nice curls and stuff but things are sort of sticking to the outside so we're gonna add a couple more forces back to frame one and i'm just gonna turn this off just so that we've got a snappy viewport shift a force field and i'm gonna click vortex set the strength to minus six and for the vortex basically a negative number will just uh change the way that it spins whereas a positive value will spin the other way then again we just want to add a little bit of inflow then let's set the power to 2 and we want to add a minimum and maximum distance again so click here and type in 0.8 and for the maximum we're going to type in 1.07 which will just sit just outside of our sphere then we do want to rotate this as well like we did with our turbulence so let's go to the rotation hover over it and hit i then head to the final frame minus 125 150 and 100 right click and insert a new keyframe now i'll just quickly show you what effect we've added so you can see things are getting pulled in closer to the center now but they're still kind of sticking to the outside so we're just going to add a couple more forces here shift a force field and we're gonna click magnetic set the strength to minus two and the flow to one we also want to rotate this as well so on frame one hit i click rotation then again all the way to frame 250 so let's just make sure we turn that off set this to minus 75 and the y to 100 then add a keyframe again back to frame one and the very last thing i did was just add one more small force so shift a for sealed and let's click drag set these both to two now that we've got that finished we can head back up to our emitter and turn this back on i'm just going to turn off my overlays and hit play and you can see that we've got really nice motion now so everything is looking really good i'm just going to head back to frame one like i always do select the emitter and we can head over to the particles now that we've got everything complete we can bake our simulation so i'm just going to turn mine up a little bit just so there's a better visual representation but like i said you can go anywhere between 50 and 125 this is more like the maximum make sure to save then just before we bake this uh you'll notice that we're kind of in the center here so we are going to be building stuff underneath so we do want to bring this up but we have to remember that we do have frames here so what we need to do is add a control to move all of this stuff so shift a empty and plain axis then just bring this up above hit a to select everything else in the scene then you can see that this is still our current selection so if we hold ctrl p and select object everything will now be under this empty so let's just rename this to all then we can just select it g said and just bring this up save and now that we've got that we can select our emitter one more time scroll all the way down and click bake so that took about two or three minutes for my system so hopefully yours was quick as well i always like to save as soon as i'm done baking then we can just click here to turn the overlays off and we can display our animation awesome so things are looking really good hopefully yours is looking good as well even if you have less particles you should still get these nice trails like this it just may not be quite as defined and that's it for simulation so now we can move on to finishing our scene so i'm just going to remove my particles again just so we've got as much speed as possible in the viewport let's head over to the shading tab first thing you want to do is add an hdri so i'm going to select here and click world then if i just zoom out you can see that we've got our basic background hooked up to here and there's a couple ways you can do this you could just select here and click environment texture which is the easiest way or you can also search for environment texture then click open and if you want to use the same hdri that i'm using just go to the link in the description and download the 1k version you don't need these just because we're only using this for lighting i'm going to use 4k just because that's the one that i have but again this will slow down your render so always uh to the lowest that you can then click open this is going to be a little bit too strong since we're going for a darker look so we're going to type in point zero 1 for the strength then like i said we don't want to use this as our background we just want to have a dark background so we can just select this shift d to duplicate click the color and we'll just bring this down we want to mix these together so shift a and search for mix shader click and then you just want to make sure that this is set up properly so let's hook this one up to the bottom and the strength doesn't matter since our value is zero anyways shift a and we're going to search for light path then in this case we want to select our top output and hook it up to the factor and what this will do is use this as our lighting information and this as our background color now we can turn on our render preview so i'm just going to click here to turn it on and you can see that we've got very basic lighting now let's head back over here and go back into the object shading then i'm just going to open this here just so that we can see all of our items and i'm going to select glass since this is surrounding everything else i'm just going to start with this so let's click new then this is going to be super basic so we're going to bring the roughness almost all the way down to about 0.1 and bring the transmission all the way up you could do this in evie but i ended up doing my final animation in cycles so if you are going to use evie make sure to head over here to the materials properties and add screen space refractions also in the render properties you're going to add screen space reflections and refractions as well then you can start to see through but if you are going to use eevee you may want to change the ior a little bit to something like 1.1 just so that you can see through a little better otherwise you will get some distortion also the other thing you can do if you go back to the material properties to go all the way down you can also add some depth which again will just help your final to look a little bit better next we can add our only other source of light which is going to be the center here we're going to click new then we want to change this to mission so the quickest way to do that is in the materials properties click here and just select emission we can change the color just a little bit and set the strength to 250. again if you are using ev feel free to add bloom as well but maybe bring it down just a little bit and now that we've got some lighting we can also bring in our background so let's just go into the render properties in either e or cycles open up film and let's uncheck transparent at this point i am going to switch over to cycles but feel free like i said to follow along in eevee if that works better for you you won't get quite the same look but these settings that i gave you should get you pretty close so switch to cycles and i'm also going to select gpu compute as well i'm going to turn on a couple other settings so adaptive sampling and i'm also going to turn on denoise and i am going to turn uh the viewport denoising on as well we want to add in the particles now so i'm just going to bring my mouse down to the bottom and when i see this plus i'm just going to drag up click here and add the timeline just so that we can scroll through anywhere to whatever frame you want then up on the right i'm just going to add the render toggles and turn on the emitter next we want to select our particle click new this is what it looks like in evie let's set the metallic to one and the roughness to zero also a trick i like to do just to get a little bit more value out of the particles is if you click on the base color we can add a little bit of color and then instead of having the value to 1 we can just type in 5 which will brighten up our particles by quite a bit so switch to cycles and now you see that we're getting some of the edges reflecting and edges that are facing away from the light are a little bit darker so you get a nice contrast and things are starting to look really good so i'm just going to add a ground plane so i'll go back into flat shading and just turn on the x-ray toggle just so we can see a little bit better shift a and select cube and this is super basic so i'm just going to scale it so s said and type in 0.1 then scale it again so s shift z to log to the x and y and type in 2. i added a little bit of subdivision to my ground so go into edit mode by hitting tab or clicking up here then let's add some loop cuts uh you could subdivide this but then you're gonna get a lot of subdivisions on these side edges which is not what we want so let's just do it with loop cuts so ctrl r and click then hit escape to leave it in the middle and set this to 25 come around to the side ctrl r one more time click then escape and set this to 25 again tab to go back into object mode head over to the modifiers properties let's click here and we're going to add a wireframe modifier then click here one more time and we can add a solidify and set the thickness to 0.03 it is looking a little bit funny so let's just scale our transform so select the object and if i hit n you can see that our scale is set to what we made it but we need these to go back to one so to reset those we hold ctrl a and select all transforms and that's looking a lot better now we can just quickly add a material so select the ground click new metallic to one set the roughness to around point two or so and again we want to set the value to something around five just quickly i'm gonna go back into the render preview just to see how things are looking then once you've found that you can quickly go back into the world properties and you can just select the hdri hold control and hit t to add a mapping and texture coordinate node using the node wrangler add-on or you can just search for them and then you just want to find whatever angle works the best for you so for me it's around 150. things are looking really good so i'm just going to quickly add a camera just so we can sort of see where we're at so shift a and camera i'm going to head back to the layout tab just so that there's a little bit more room set up my view to something that i like and then we're just gonna hold control alt and hit zero on the numpad to lock the camera to the viewport then just hit n and use your location toggles just to straighten things out a little bit then we can just add a little bit of depth of field so head into the camera properties click depth of field let's select a focus object so the best one for this is our center sphere then you can set the f-stop to something around point eight or so and that should work fine keep in mind that the lower you set this the longer render times you're gonna get i'm just gonna do a quick render just to see sort of where we're at for now i'm just going to set it to around 175 add some motion blur and i also added a little bit of extra motion blur to mine just to give it a slightly more streaky look but again keep in mind that this will add to your render times great so just a quick render just to see where we're at and things are looking really good and when i'm using cycles i typically do that just because it can be difficult sometimes to see where you're at without having a full render whereas in eevee it's a little bit easier i'm just going to scale things just a little bit something like that looks a little better and now we can finish our scene so i'm just going to get out of the render preview and also turn off my emitter just so things are moving a little quicker i just added a basic cylinder for my stand so something like that and let's just select our outer edge here by holding alt and selecting this in either vertex or edge select mode then hit i to inset click and we can just add a few more subdivisions as well of course we don't want this to intersect with our sphere so we can turn on proportional editing by clicking up here which will just give us a fall off when we move our vertices so g said and you can see if i drag down kind of the whole thing is moving so there's a couple things we can do first let's click here and select connected only then hit g set again and you can see now it's only the top vertices we also want to scroll in with our mouse key just so that we're only getting the ones that we really want bring this down just so it's somewhere close to that and then we can alt select this loop turn off proportional editing and just hit cheese add just to bring this back up then you just want to click control r and just add some random loot cuts just to give it some definition also add some insets to the bottom face as well then when you've got something that you like that's much nicer than that you can go back into object mode and shade smooth something that helps everything look a little bit nicer is in the modifiers tab click here and add a subdivision of two then you can just hit g inside just to bring this up so that it's nice and snug i'm also going to bring the ground up as well save and then we'll just quickly go back into the shading select our object click new and then we can just add something metallic i added some random texture to mine so feel free to do that as well as you're going along just making a small tweak so i'm just going to bring the roughness up on the glass to around point two just so that we get a little bit of a glowy reflection again i know this is looking a little bit funny so anytime you can just go into the camera and if you want to do uh a super quick render you can just bring the sampling down and you can also just bring the size down as well which will just help you get a little bit quicker of a render awesome so that's looking pretty good but like i said you can make this anything you want so maybe we can change this a little bit really just to whatever works for your scene so something like that should be fine and that is almost everything the only other thing i did was add a base to this and add a character in the background so i'm just gonna quickly do that and add the same material as i did for the ground that's looking great so you can just move your particle further out of the way if you want just so that it's nowhere in view then the very final thing that you notice with mine is it was a little bit empty in the background so i added a character so if you want to do that just go to mixamo.com and you can sign up for a free account and this is the character that i chose but this doesn't really matter it's really more about the animation so i went into animation and if you type in goalkeeper idol you'll see that there's this version here which is basically what i used i did modify this because you can see it is moving pretty quick so bring the overdrive down and bring the arm spacing up to something around 56 since i used a lot of frames for mine i also upped this quite a bit just so that i had more to work with but you probably only need about 100 frames to be totally honest then you can download set this to 24 frames per second i prefer to use fbx just because i think it's a little less glitchy click download then back into blender file import and select fbx then you just want to select the fbx that you saved and click import you can see that it's kind of hidden inside our thing so let's scale that up so hit s and type in 20 to make this quite large we also want to rotate this so r and said and type in 90. then g and z just to bring this all the way down g x then you can just put this into whatever position you want something like that worked for me you'll see that if i hit play we do have a lot of motion and it's a little bit too much so i did a little bit more uh tweaking with mine just to get the right keyframes but a quick way to do this is once you've got all these selected hit s to scale and type in 10 which will just space our keyframes out quite a bit and now if you play you can see that it's moving a lot slower the only other issue that i see is the hand gets really close on this side so for this animation i noticed that it sort of comes over to this side and sort of stays over here so once it gets to this point where it's very close i'm just going to grab these keyframes and just drag this all the way to frame one then if we go back to frame one we can just hit g and y to move this over again click and now if you hit play you can see that it sort of just stays centered around this which is more what we want and in fact this actually turned out better than the animation i used so hopefully that works for you and that's it so back into the camera view and let's go into render preview and turn everything back on one more thing that i did as well just to bring this together is if you click your ground plane just right click and shade smooth and for whatever reason this just seems to look a lot better so we can head back into the rendering tab i'm going to crank this back up again and i'm going to turn my samples back up render and render image and there's the final image so hopefully yours is looking exactly like this like i said for this shade smooth on the ground we'll just lay into the scene a little bit nicer you'll notice that this was a minute and 16 for this one frame so you can imagine that doing 250 frames will take a little bit longer so some things that you can do is you can take your motion blur down a little bit which will speed it up of course your samples can be lowered to help speed up the render as well i also had mine at 150 so this is a lot bigger than a normal frame would be if we were to set this to 100 for example and bring our samples back down to something like 175 as well setting our motion blur back down then you'll see of course that this has gone significantly faster we've done this in 26 seconds and it looks almost just as good so keep that in mind that if you do have a slower system there are ways to speed up your simulation and as well the final thing that you can do to speed this up is just lower your particle count before you bake so i hope you all enjoyed this tutorial make sure to like and subscribe as well if you want to get the original file for my animation you can head to my patreon page sign up to become a member and you'll get access to my original animation files for everything you see on the channel thank you again for your support and i hope to see you soon bye you

Channel: Aria Faith Jones

Views: 16,107

Keywords: simulation, animation, howto, tutorial, particles, howtomake, cgart, cgartist, vfx, vfxartist, cycles, render, lighting, eevee, blender, blender3d, davinciresolve, cameraloop, 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, particles blender 2.8, particles blender 2.9, particle simulation blender, beautiful particles, cycles blender tutorial, dof, depth of field

Id: apMpa4gKt9k

Length: 31min 22sec (1882 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Ariafaithjones]

Sci-Fi Magic Ball Particle Simulation! 💥💫 (NEW microphone 🎤)