Blender | How to Make a Sci-Fi Particle Creature Simulation | TUTORIAL

hey this is arya and today we're making a sci-fi particle creature make sure to like and subscribe if you enjoy my work and as always if you're able to support me even further hop over to my patreon page where you can sign up to become a member where you get access to the exact file that i use for my animation as well as the other files you see on my channel alright here we go the first thing we'll do is hit a to select everything then hit delete to clear the scene next hold shift and hit a go to mesh and select uv sphere now we want to scale this up so hit s to scale and type in two then you can just bring this up by hitting g set and typing in three then let's just head over here to the right to the modifiers tab click here and let's add a subdivision surface of one then just to smooth this out we can right click and shade smooth awesome so we're gonna use this as our emitter so let's just head over to the particle properties here on the right next we can click this plus symbol to add a new particle system then we're just going to go through and start making some changes so for mine i set this to 10 000 which should be okay for most computers but since we are going to duplicate this later feel free to set this to like 7 500. okay so we don't want this to start from zero so what we're going to do is set our frame start to something like -20 and you'll see that something is already happening here and the reason why is because we're on frame 44 so just click here and let's head back to frame one next we're going to set our end frame to 400 you'll notice that this is set to something higher and the reason i'm setting it to that is because my animation was 500 frames and with particles depending on your start and end frame and your amount blender will calculate how many particles to output per frame so basically it's going to take 10 000 particles and output it over 420 frames and if i were to set this to 250 to match our animation length you'd get a lot more particles coming out at once so the nice thing about this setup is if you want to do a longer animation you can just set this to 500 and double the length of your animation okay so let's set the lifetime to something like 600 this doesn't really matter just make sure that it's longer than the length of your animation then we can set the randomness to 0.15 we may not notice this effect but just to give it a little bit of variance then we can scroll all the way past velocity setting to the physics then we're going to change this from newtonian to voids you'll see now that we've gotten rid of our velocity settings that used to sit in between the cache and the physics because our void system will be calculating all of the physics other than any forces that we had and let's just open battle and we can change the aggression to five then just scroll down a little further open up the void brain then we just want to make sure that we've got our first rule selected and then hit minus now we're left with just one rule which is flock and that's it so let's just scroll down a little bit further instead of having halos as our particle we're going to create an object so click object set the scale to 0.04 and the scale random to 0.5 then we need to select our object so let's create one back in the 3d viewport by hitting shift a mesh and we can click icosphere then let's just bring this out of the way by hitting g you said and we can just drag this down hit the decimal key on your numpad just to orbit in around our particle feel free to leave the particle as is but if you do want to add some variants like i did just hit tab to go into edit mode or you can click up here and click edit mode then we're just going to deselect everything click on the proportional editing then you just want to randomly grab vertices hit g and you can just bring some of these out and some of these in as well just to give a more random look to your particle great so that should work just fine it just captures the light a little bit better just because there's more angles and stuff for the light to bounce off of now you can hit tab to go back into object mode or click here then we can just zoom back out and click on our sphere which by the way is our emitter so let's just rename this to emitter and we can click our ico sphere and rename this to particle one so click back on the emitter make sure you're in the particle settings then we'll just scroll all the way back down to the object click here and choose particle one then the last thing you need to do is just make sure that we grab our gravity and set it to zero cool so when you hit play you should have something that looks like this where you just have particles traveling around so if you have that then just make sure again to head back to frame one and now we can start to add our forces so hold shift a and let's go all the way down to force field and the first force field that we're going to add is force so click that we want to make sure that this is center with our particle system so let's hit g said and three now we can head over to the physics properties let's change the strength to three and the flow to two next we're going to add a turbulence so shift a again force field and then click turbulence let's bring this up again so g said in three back over to the physics settings we'll change the strength to 5.1 and the flow to one awesome and then we're just gonna add one more force so shift a again force field and let's select the vortex g said and three again to bring this up then we're gonna hit g y and we're just gonna bring this over here just until it's outside of our simulation then the very final thing we want to do is rotate this so we're going to hit our x and type in 90. one more time back over to the physics properties change the strength to 2 and the inflow to 0.1 great so everything should be all set make sure that you're on frame 1 and then hit play so hopefully you have something that is looking like this if not just make sure that you've got all your correct values for each of your forces keep in mind that there is an empty value in the turbulence here so you want to leave that to zero and make sure the flow is set to one also sometimes if you make some changes blender doesn't reset so what you can do is if you're having an issue just pick one of your forces click on one of your values and just retype in the value then when you go back to frame one you should have no issues great so we've got our particle system finished so the last thing we want to do is just click on our system head over to the particles and make sure that we uncheck show emitter for the render and for the viewport as well so we've got our particle system so let's head back to frame one i found the best way to do this was just to duplicate this particle system and set of forces and put them each into their own collections so i'm going to show you how i did that let's just head up to our scene collection here make sure you select where it says screen collection then we're going to click this here until we've got seven new collections then we just want to rename these all just so that we can keep track so again name these whatever you want i just named them tea for tentacle but you can do whatever you feel like just make sure that it is consistent because later on we will be selecting them through this list here okay so we'll leave our main collection here just for our scene objects such as our particle but we're going to take everything else so click the emitter shift and then click the field to grab everything then we'll just click and drag and drop this into t1 okay so make sure that you've got all four of these selected then we'll go into the 3d viewport hold shift hit d then hit escape just to drop it in place then you'll see that we've got a copy of each of these and they're selected so we're just going to grab drag and drop those into t2 great so now if we were to hit play you'll see that we basically just have two particle systems doing the exact same thing which of course is not what we want we want to make sure that this is rotated so head back to frame one then the way i like to rotate things is to use an empty so shift a empty and plane axis since we want to rotate from the center we're gonna move this to the center so g zed and three now if we just go up here you'll see that i accidentally was selected on t1 so it placed it in there so let's just grab this and drop it into t2 so now we want to parent our new system to this empty so we're going to click the emitter then hold ctrl then we're going to click all three of our forces then still holding control we're going to click our empty last then in the viewport we can hold ctrl and hit p and select our middle option key transform now if we open up our md you'll see that everything is inside of it now we just want to hit n on our keyboard to open up our transform settings and honestly this was the hardest part for me was just figuring out which angle each of these should be on so i'm just going to give you the values for all of these as we go through just so that you're not wasting time trying to figure out which angle it should be on if we click the first emitter here you'll see everything is set to zero so we're just going to leave that as our base rotation so the next thing we want to do is have one going up and down so inside of t2 let's click our empty then we can just click our x value and type in 90. now you can see that our particle system is facing this way then if we play you'll see that we've now introduced a new issue so what's happening here is both of our particle emitters are using all of these forces into one which is not what we want so what we need to do is separate our forces which is where our collections come in so if we head up to t1 and click the emitter scroll all the way down to the bottom to our field ways you'll see that we have a factor collection which just basically means that it will only use the effectors from the collection that you select so click here and we'll select t1 then of course we want to do that to our second particle system so we'll just click the emitter here under t2 head down and you'll see that it's already set as t1 so if you were to click this and to set it to t2 the problem is if we were to go to our first emitter you'll see that it's also set to d2 so what we need to do is duplicate our particle system so let's just click here and set this back to t1 for our first emitter then click on this emitter inside of t2 scroll all the way up to the top of the particle system then all you need to do is just click this copy button and you'll get a new particle system now you'll see if we click on our other emitter we have this particle settings and particle settings 001 so now if we scroll all the way back down to the effector collection click here we can select t2 and you'll see that they are now separate collections so back to frame one and hit play and you'll see that we've got it working properly now so now we just need to do that a few more times so let's select the empty inside of t2 then you want to shift select so that we've got everything inside of our collection selected hold shift d and hit escape to leave it in place then back up to the right here and we'll just open our new md click on it and then we'll shift select everything for our new system click and we'll drag this into t3 then we're going to have our particle system facing along this axis here so we just need to rotate this up on the y by 90 degrees so let's click the y and type in 90. then again we'll click on our emitter head up to the top so we can just make a copy so click here all the way back down and select t3 hit play and you can see now that we've got everything working in six directions so of course you could just leave it at this if you wanted but if you want to get all the tentacles that i had you just need to do this a few more times so i'm just gonna go through this a little bit quicker this time but i'm going to stop each time and make sure i give you the rotation settings because again this was the most confusing part awesome so as always back to frame 1 just so that we're not getting weird results in our viewport click the new md shift-click so we have all of our stuff shifty and escape open this up and make sure to click and then shift click everything then drag and drop these into our new system click on the empty then we're going to change both our x and ry to 45 click the emitter head up to the top make a copy head down and make sure to select t4 click shift click shift d escape open this up select everything drag and drop click empty and the rotation settings for these are going to be minus 45 and leave the set at zero click the emitter back up to the top make a copy then set the effector collection to c5 select them all duplicate select them all again drag and drop click the empty then we'll set both our x and y to 45 and this add to 90. click the emitter make a copy then change this to d6 now the very last time we're just going to select everything here duplicate and leave it in place open this up select everything and we'll just drop this into t7 select empty and for our final rotation we're going to set our x to minus 45 our y to 45 and our set to zero click on this emitter make a copy and set this to seven so you see that if we play things are just sort of going straight out whereas in my animation these were spinning around a little bit more so the way i did that was we'll just go back to frame one add a new empty by hitting shift a and selecting plane axis g said and three to center it then let's just scale this up just so we can see it so s and type in ten then if we just come over to the right here you'll see that i wasn't really paying attention so it probably dropped it into the collection that i was selected on so i'm just going to click and drag this up to our main collection then double click and rename this control all then make sure you've got it selected and when you're in the 3d viewport you can hit a which will select everything in our scene for us and then hold control hit b then again you want to select the middle option which is object keep transform so if we just go over to our collections here and open this up you'll see that everything is parented and just keep in mind that these are just sort of little containers because we still have them all in each of our collections now you can just click away and we're just gonna click on our new control and set a keyframe on the rotation then if we just head all the way to the final frame don't worry about these particles we want to set all of our rotation values to something like 50 right click and insert a new keyframe now if you hit play you'll see that we've got a little bit more movement with our particles here we are now past the hardest part so you could bake your particles at this point but for my animation i also added a ground object and made sure that was a collision just because some of these particles go a little bit low so if you don't care you can bake them now but if not just hang on for one more step so instead of creating my own ground plane i actually use the landscape builder so if you do want to use this and don't have this installed it's super easy just go up to edit preferences and make sure to select add-ons all then just type in landscape and make sure that this is checked on then you can hit shift a mesh and landscape make sure not to click away head down to the left here to open our settings then we're just going to make this a lot larger so let's set this to 50. change our noise size to something like three and we can also change our height make sure that if you don't want uh your tops to be flattened there just change the maximum to something larger than the height if you don't like the way this is looking feel free to just go through the seed options here just to find something that is a little bit more to your liking then once you're happy with everything you can just click away now if you click on the ground plane again you can head over to the physics properties and add a collision i also made sure to subdivide mine but you want to make sure that that goes after the collision just so that it's not as heavy for the system so add the collision first then in the modifiers tabs we can click here and add a subdivision surface of one or two now we can just bring this down by hitting g said and we can just bring this down by about three or so then click all right so we're finally ready to make our particles so you can just pick any one of our emitters here head over to the particle settings then we're just going to open up the cache and instead of baking for each particle system we'll just go here to bake all dynamics so hit bake and this should take less than a minute now before we play our simulation i always like to remove a collision physics just to speed up the viewport so select the ground head over to the physics and remove the collision now if we hit play you can see that we've got our full simulation select this filter toggle and we're going to add our simulation and render toggles then we just need to open up our control and select our particle then we can turn the viewport and the render off then close this down and if you notice you can see that again i was selecting the wrong collection so our landscape dropped into here so we can just click and drag this to our main collection also for the particle if you want you can just turn it back on select it and then if you head back to frame one you can hold alt hit p and you can clear the parent that way you'll see now that it's not being controlled by our control it just sits underneath our landscape so again make sure that you're saving and hit play and you should have your entire system going and hopefully things are looking awesome for you now all we need to do is add some lighting and texture so just pick a frame that looks nice to you and we can work from there since we're done using all of our collections for now you can just click the arrow on all of these by the way if you've got a really slow computer you can definitely turn some of these off for now which will help speed up your viewport but i'm just gonna leave mine on just so that we get the full effect so we're going to start by adding our camera so this time just make sure that you selected the collection here just so that it doesn't end up inside one of our other collections then you can hit shift a and click camera then just tap your viewport in front of your creature hold ctrl alt and hit zero then you can just use the transform settings on the right here under item to set your view also if you hit f3 and type in walk you can use your mouse as well as your arrow keys to move in and out and orbit you can also use the q in e to go up and down as well so let's just set this to something basic for now and click then we can start adding the rest of our scenes so shift a let's go to mesh and click cylinder then we're just going to scale this up so that we've got a large background then just make sure that this is large enough so that you're not going in and out of it right click and shade smooth so let's head over to our shading tab and again we can just turn on our render preview again head up to our collections and we can just click on our particle then we want to hit new click here to change the base color to something gray then we just want to bring our transmission up to something like point eight next hit shift a and we're going to search for bump click and then we'll hook the normal to the normal shift a again search for noise then we can hook the factor up to the height as well as our roughness then we'll set our scale to 15 detail to 25 and our distortion to 0.2 which will just give us a little bit of texture then the final thing we need to do is shift a and search for color ramp then we're just going to bring our dark and light values into the center before we move on let's just add some lights so shift a then we'll come all the way down to light and click points we want to bring this up so g said and three then we'll just come over to the right and click on this little light bulb icon select the color and set this to something red then we can set the power to 2500 and now you see that we're starting to get somewhere so next we want to click on our landscape click new then we just want to bring our base value down and at this point you can honestly add whatever kind of texture you want the truth is it doesn't show up that much in the render anyways but if you want you can head to textures.com you will have to sign up for a free account and i'll leave the link in the description as well then the only two things that you need is the normal map and the roughness once you've got your textures you can drag and drop the normal and the roughness plug the roughness into the roughness shift a to search for normal then color into color and normal into normal and just see right away that things are looking a little bit weird so since this is not made from uh just a normal plane it actually doesn't have a uv so we can make sure we add that which is super easy just head over to the uv editing then we just want to turn off our cylinder here just so it doesn't get in our way hit seven on your num pad just to go into top orthographic make sure that everything is selected and you can hit u and project from view then we just want to scale this up a little bit so we're going to hit s and we'll just drag this out until it's a little bit larger now if we head back to our shading tab you can see that it's looking a little better now i'm not really liking the amount of roughness so we can do is shift a and let's search for a color ramp then if we just add this in between we can just bring our values a little bit closer here just to get a bit more roughness so let's just bring this down to something like that you can also turn off your overlays if you just need to see a little bit better things are looking pretty good we're actually almost done let's turn our cylinder back on then we just want to add a quick material to this so just make sure that you have it selected click new then we can just bring the specular all the way down and the roughness all the way up click the base color and bring the value all the way to zero okay so things are starting to look really good let's add another light you see that we can't really see anything and that's because our overlays are off so we'll just click here to turn our overlays back on shift a light and we'll click area then g said and we'll just drag this up until it's above our particles if you just come over to the right here click on the light properties let's change the shape to ellipse so now we can just zoom in a little bit just so we can see and we want to scale this up so just hit s we can just drag this until it's about the size of our particles system then click head over to the power and we're going to set this to 2000 click here then we're going to make this slightly blue great so let's just head back to the layout tab and we're getting really close so let's hit zero just to go into our camera click on your landscape and it's looking a little bit small so let's just hit g and x just to move this back a little bit then we want to scale this so you can just hit s shift set and type in 1.5 and then again gtx just to bring this a little bit further back i didn't do this in ev so at this point i'm going to switch over to cycles by going into the render engine and selecting cycles the ground is a little bit lighter than in my simulation so you can just go to shading again click on the landscape then you can just click on the base color and set this to something a little darker like that as well if you want your textures to be a little bit smaller you can either go back into the uv and scale it or you can just click on one of these then if you've got the node wrangler add-on enabled by going to edit preferences add-ons and typing in node make sure this is turned on then select one of these hit control t and hook the factor to both of the vectors then you can select all of the scale values and set this to something like five again this is just a base you can go through and tweak this any way you like head back to the layout now there's only a couple more things i did so if you want to add some atmospheric particles it's super easy just make sure to turn back your overlays on and let's go to flat shading then if you just zoom out a bit we can just turn off our cylinder at the moment just so we can see shift a mesh and cube then just scale this up till it's covering as much scene as you want head over to the particle system click here to add a new particle system then i think i did something like 25 000. you want to set these all to frame one and set the lifetime to something like 500 then open up the source and instead of faces we want to do volume head back to frame one just to reload our system then we'll just head down to velocity set this to zero give our system some brownian motion just to give it some shaky particles click here to add a new particle object then we'll hit shift a mesh and select uv sphere you'll see that if i put on x-ray it's kind of in the way so again just hit g zed just to bring this down and out of the way then we'll just add a quick material so click here click new and instead of having our principal shader we're going to add an emission shader set the color to something a little bit red and we'll set the value way down to 0.025 click back on the emitter turn off our x-ray then we'll go back to the particle settings scroll all the way down click here then in this case we're going to select our sphere which is our new particle so you can also name this particle too back into the emitter settings we're going to make sure that we turn off show emitter for both the viewport and the render then you'll see that this is going to be affected by all of our forces which is not what we want so we're going to make a new collection by clicking here click new then we can just name this world particles grab our cube control click on our particle then we can just drag and drop these into our new collection now if we click back on the cube we can go down and do just what we did before and select the effector collection to be the world particles which is nothing while we're here let's just turn our gravity all the way to zero as well now if we hit play you'll see that we've just got these uh particles sort of just floating around in the air if this is too heavy for your system you can definitely lower the amount by quite a bit you can go all the way down to like 10 000 and it should be fine i just wanted to have a lot of particles in mine then once you're happy with that make sure again to select the cube and hit bake make sure to save and now if we hit 0 to go back into our view and turn on our render preview you can see that we've got a bunch of particles so let's just turn our cylinder back on our overlays off then we can just pick a frame click our camera and we're just going to add some depth of field so click here to add depth of field and we're going to set the f-stop to 0.2 everything has gone blurry so what we need to do is just select a focus object overlays back on in flat shading then shift a empty plane axis and we can call this focus you can click and drag this up then just drop it into our main collection as well g said three now back into the camera settings click here then we'll go all the way down and select our focus object back into the camera and let's turn on render preview i'm just going to quickly go back to the particle settings and delete my bake set this to 10 000 then quickly rebake and if they're still a bit too intrusive you can just change the scale a little bit and we can change our scale random to 0.8 now you'll see that it looks a lot more sparse and natural so the final thing i wanted to show you is just how i got my camera to circle around so one more time we're just going to go back into flat shading turn our overlays back on then we're going to click on our camera head over to the constraints then if we click here you can see that there's an option that says track 2. so we want to click that then we can select our new empty which was focus then you'll see if we hit zero to go back into our camera view here any way that we move our camera it will stay focused on our objects so this is really cool i'm just gonna do a super quick example for you so back to frame one keep in mind that once you've got a constraint activated you can't use your walk navigation anymore so you could just x this out and use that to animate or you can simply just use the location controls up here and i found just using the location controls is enough since our rotation is taken care of by the focus object so find a good starting frame then right click and add a key then if we were just go to frame 60 we could just come to the side like this and you can see as we move these our rotation isn't changing but it is staying focused on our object here then right click and insert a keyframe now if we hit play you can see that we've got this kind of thing happening here that's a little quick so we'll just bring this back just keep in mind that i did a 500 frame animation so this will need to be a little bit quicker but you can do something like that then if you go to something like frame 180 you could spin all the way around here to the back then insert a keyframe finally head to the final keyframe and we can just bring this all the way back around here to something like that and add a keyframe now if we were to hit play you can see that we've got our camera which is staying focused on our simulation great so that's everything i'm just gonna pick a frame here turn back on our render preview head over to the rendering tab save one more time then render and there it is our final image so i hope you all enjoyed this and this gave you a good start i'd love to see what you come up with or what you utilize this in making so again always make sure to tag me like and subscribe and as well if you can support me through patreon that would be amazing and you'll be able to get the exact file that i use for my animation along with a bunch of others okay hope to see you soon bye you

Channel: Aria Faith Jones

Views: 34,112

Keywords: simulation, animation, howto, tutorial, particles, howtomake, cgart, cgartist, vfx, vfxartist, cycles, render, lighting, eevee, blender, blender3d, davinciresolve, 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, movement, simulate, art, lights, evil, dark, sci fi, sci fi simulation, sci fi animation, amazing simulations, top 10 simulations, particle simulation blender, creation, creature, monster

Id: W-1B28GKjXA

Length: 31min 49sec (1909 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Ariafaithjones]

Sci-Fi Particle Creature 🐲

[u/xpoc]

Looks really good.