Blender JELLYFISH󠀠󠀠󠀠 󠀠ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ(for Nodevember)

hey there everybody and welcome back to another blender tutorial I know this one's a bit late but I was sick and am sick and I lost my voice long story shorts were making jellyfish this is the important so uh here I have a geometry notes jellyfish of course for my original one I made it a bit better but with the materials oh yeah it just looks so good um and it turns out that a jellyfish is actually super simple to make our game plan is the cap of it is going to be like half a sphere that we're gonna distort and then we're gonna have tendrils coming down with certain rules and after we do that we're gonna have a jellyfish let's begin in Geometry notes take everything deleted and replace it with a cube and what I'm going to do is like I said start with a UV sphere I feel like I'm croaking just trying to talk uh I want to take this fear and turn it into a hemisphere in other words cut it in half to do that we can either use a delete geometry or what I find is a lot simpler is we use a separate geometry node which will let us take the position some separating based on how tall in a sense it is on the z-axis right so we take the z-axis plug it in there and um if we use a greater than node to kind of filter through the height we can now pick a selection of the hemisphere so again we have a sphere we are separating it into the section that is greater than the Z component is greater than some value and as we increase the resolution here that is going to be more fine of the division and we can actually get the inverse which is not useful for us um okay so I'm just going to take the part that is bigger than zero and the reason I want to do that is because now when we transform it to make it a bit flatter it's going to scale on the X Y plane because there's nothing below it I'm struggling here boys so I'm going to flatten it and now the next step is to have it oscillate and like pulsate it's probably a better word to do that what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a set position node anytime we want to change the position your boy's struggling anytime we want to change the position we use a set position node I want to offset it by the normal but not everywhere it's going to be based on a selection that we are going to dictate the strength of using the scale so you can see this controls how much this is growing based on the normal to make a map for this I think what I'm going to do is I want the map that tells us how radially out we are so it starts here and then it grows out radially and that's going to tell us how much to pulsate depending on the position there so I'm going to take the position I'm going to extract the length of it and this length can be plugged in right here and uh what it should be doing I guess we want the X Y length so it doesn't actually care about the Z coordinates it's like we're projecting from the top so I'm going to multiply by one one zero there we go now we have a pulsating not pulsating we have a deformed thing to get it to pulsate so all we have to do is manipulate it over time so I'm going to add to our gradient so you can see what this looks like is it kind of just grows and I want to have this be repetitious so I'm going to send it through a fraction and now we get something a bit more close to what we want it's pulsating in the wrong direction and a bit too fast so I'm going to make a negative and 0.5 to make it twice as slow and then to have it not have this kind of like discontinuity where it's basically the fraction it's either zero or one right on the boundary so we have a zero to one thing and then on the boundary it goes from one to zero very quickly what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a color ramp uh to soften that so it's going to be black on both edges and somewhat brighter in the middle and we can use easing so now we have something that looks a bit better we basically just made the um wave modifier in a sense okay um second part of this is making the tendrils but I guess before we make the tendrils let's just make this thing a bit more detailed because it kind of looks a bit plain so what I can do is I can set position I can offset specifically on the z-axis and what I care about is taking this Rim which is a circle and making it wavy so to do that I can take a radial gradient which is just going to give us the angle as we go around from zero to one I want to take the radial gradient right there and feed it through a noise so basically our noise is going to change as we go around and then feed that into the combine XYZ see what that gives us yeah now it looks a bit more like a cloth to make it a less intense especially in the middle I want to take this length from before so I'm going to capture this length attribute bring it over and now it doesn't look as awful so let's see it's going to be doing this by zero in the middle and then it's going to increase and we can modify this with a color ramp let's see if I bring this slider up this will soften the transition a bit let's use some easing that looks awful we're going to take this and instead of rising it up we're going to multiply by negative one so it's kind of like draping instead so we took the rim and we said bring it downwards and we can again soften that transition and make it less intense and this just adds a bit of shape to what we're doing also there's no reason we can't up the detail on something like this we do want more rotational segments I believe to get this to be a bit cleaner and now we have this effect which I think looks pretty cool and now what we want to do is make the tendrils and I know what you're thinking why don't you just distribute some points for each one drop a tendril you're going to notice that the distribution of points is going to change is going to be pretty similar but it's going to change this is because the mesh is pulsating there are ways around this um but what I'm going to do and I don't know if ID would help using an ID mask no there are ways around this I believe we're like Distributing before and then casting the points to keep it simple remember that our jellyfish is actually made of points so we can use those that are already oscillating for the thing so I'm going to instance on points what am I going to instance a curve that goes downwards so it's going to be like draping downwards and I don't want it to be everywhere I want it to be based on a selection so we can actually use our length from before and ask where is it less than some value so this is going to grow out radially so we want something like that and we can multiply this so it's not Everywhere by a probability so a random value so each point gets a number between 0 and 1. and that a number let's actually see what we're doing here that number will dictate whether or not it spawns a thing so I'm saying uh only keep like 2.7 percent of the points okay um some other things we can do is randomize the scale so I want this to be hmm I guess we could do a complicated function for this for now um let's isolate the Z component since that's what we care about I'm going to use a random value so it can go between 0 and let's say like four and now when we take this and join it with our original mesh we get a jellyfish with the tendrils and now the name of the game is to make them look distorted and all this um to do this I'm going to resample the Curve give it like 30 points each ah so you could think of this as each curve has 30 points and I'm struggling here boys what I want to do is distort these so I'm going to use a set position node anytime we want to change the position we use a noise texture I guess we have to realize those instances as well so it's actual geometry Center the noise and uh scale it trick we've been using for decades so I'm going to make a low frequency noise and we can make it this instead of just like a random coordinate system where it just distorts what we can do is we can make this relative to the index which I think is pretty cool so like we'd uh type an index here has the um what do we call it the coordinate space and as we animate this over time I guess it's looking pretty weird do I want this to be 3D something like that I'm just playing with the settings to get something that I like the look of I think we need a very low scale there we go now we're getting a bit closer so I really want low frequency detail and now if we animate those over time it's going to be kind of in respect to the tendrils in a sense so we're going to make this relative to time foreign let's give our curve some thickness curve to mesh and for our profile curve we can use a circle I'm sorry I'm not talking that much I I really can't but if I don't do this I'm going to follow more than two tutorials behind them fine being a day behind but two tutorials it's like it's going to be a bit rough okay so I want to set the curve radius so it's not all the same everywhere so this is going to be kind of like our thickness in a sense and we don't need this many points this is something we can randomize so you can see now it's looking a bit chunky um one interesting thing is if you interpolate this by the domain of the spline each spline will get its own thickness instead of varying by point which I think looks pretty good so I'm just going to bring down the thickness by the way since these points are poking out I think there's two things we can do I think first line of defense is we can make them very thin at the top so you don't see them so I'm going to multiply by the spline parameter and you can see that got rid of most of it so the factor is zero up here and then it grows as we go downwards that kind of helps I think another thing we can do is we can just move the points before they get instanced so I'm going to set position offset by the normal which makes it look crazy never judge a book by its cover and we can uh scale it negative a bit so it's going inwards and now we have fixed the thing I'm thinking that the random scale doesn't look too good I want to have I'm getting more water I want to have a bunch of tendrils that are like some zero to one length and some of them can be like way longer right that's the idea so I want to uh kind of ramp color ramp our random value ah for the scale so to do this I'm going to map this 0 to 1 and instead of going from 0 to 4 like it was before zero to one times four which is effectively the same thing but the nice thing about this is 0 to 1 works with color ramp it actually also works with the RGB curves let's do that instead and what do I want to do I don't want this to be zero to one I want it to be like zero to whatever yeah and there are some tendrils too I didn't even think about that the first time I made it so I'm just like shaping the curves here okay awesome um I guess I did add a bit more detail in my original so I'm going to set position again use another noise texture use this I'm just trying to wrap this boy up as fast as possible what I am doing is I'm adding a second line of noise using the same technique and I want this to be of higher scale and this one's just going to like really add a bit of variety here I think that looks good only other thing we could do is we could add some pulsating to the tendrils as this pulsates but I think that's a bit much for now I want to work on the material and by the way this is poking out a little so I'm going to bring down the scale bring it down a little I want to work on the material the material is actually super simple to make a jellyfish you want to use a set material node laughs and um for me I'm gonna set up an hdri environment which seems weird especially since this is supposed to be an underwater scene whatever environment texture hdri there we go so now our jellyfish has some lighting okay and um let's see we can go to the Shader editor use this material so now it's a link to it so whatever we do to this material it's going to transfer over here's the trick transmission bring it up so it's glass bring down the roughness too it's already kind of looking like a jellyfish pick a color that's a jellyfish-like like blue make it a bit subtle and then the last part is you want to take a fresnel kind of a clamped for now and multiply it by like some big number like five or something I know huge you we take this use this as the emission strength and bring up the emission to some color this is going to add glow to the edges and make this look super cool as you can see yeah that looks awesome we could also add a bit of clear coat and the final thing is we want to put this bad boy underwater so I'm just going to make a cube give it a material here's a simple underwater Shader take a principled volume connect it to the volume bring down the density so we can actually see what's going on and pick a Oceanic kind of color so something like this and I think the final step is to bring down the interest could be whatever it's called something like that and you can take your jellyfish duplicate it rotate it you can have a little jellyfish field oh that's a denoise so we can see what's going on a little hard to tell um but for the rest of the scene I just positioned you know jellyfish and stuff like this so I think I need to wrap up I can't talk but um I hope you enjoyed this tutorial blend file and the uh patreon and also in gumroad description thank you so much for watching hopefully I feel better tomorrow

Channel: CGMatter

Views: 34,172

Keywords: blender, nodevember, 2022, geometry nodes, procedural, jellyfish

Id: zdivNPbugzY

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 07 2022