Blender Procedural Electricity Tutorial (The Only and Best Method)

all right good morning afternoon or evening this is mini falafel with a really nice tutorial in my opinion about how to make procedural electricity with blender so this i'm just gonna pull up this video to show you kind of what we're expecting it's pretty short so it might not yeah show before it loads yeah okay that wasn't great but this is kind of what it looks like right pretty cool all right now i'm going to show you how to make it so i just pull up blender so you have a new scene destroy the default cube and make a plane tab into edit mode and then i just merge at center so i have a single vertex or you could add that modifier that lets you do that automatically at a single vertex anyway what i'm going to do is just extrude on the z by about four it doesn't really matter anyway uh hook the new or the ends to new objects do that and then the middle two this is optional but i like having the control of the center of the arc because um this instead of being a plane we're actually going to rename it now is going to be electric arc and then obviously we're going to move this to a new scene called electricity obviously yes clearly and then move all of these two to that electricity collection and then i'm gonna rename these you don't have to but arc base and uh what's that arc end then this one bark middle all right cool so now if we just kind of move this stuff around you can kind of see that it controls it but after we have all these hook modifiers we actually want to add a subdivision surface modifier up that to however many you want i i don't really care a whole lot but um make sure that it's the same in your viewport as it is in your render and then after the subdivision surface modifier we're going to add a skin modifier that's to give the bolts some thickness uh so in order to make this not super thick we're going to tap into edit mode select all the vertices and just so you can see i've selected all the vertices i'm going to turn on wireframe anyway and then hit control a and that'll let you scale the size of each vertex which is kind of a weird shortcut in my opinion but make sure that's really thin because obviously electricity is pretty thin and with the displacement it might look a little thicker but now we have this and it's got some thickness and like curves and stuff and you kind of have control over where it is so this is pretty close to pretty much the base of everything here let me just for the sake of uh ocd turn that to individual origins turn that and just make them not so big because i don't like when they're giant anyway after the skin modifier add a displacement modifier actually you know what we could do we could move the skin modifier down below the displacement modifier uh this one we're going to call uh swooshy cool yeah we're going to turn this to global coordinates and uh we're going to put this in the x direction because we're going to call this x dis for x displace and go to the texture editor make this clouds yeah that actually looks a little bit better all right turn up the scale quite a bit because we want you know we want that to be very nice all right um now one other thing we're going to add a vertex group really quick of all of these center vertices just out of our text group called uh arc middle uh and then assign these just so that we only apply this displacement modifier kind of to the middle right that way we have these hooks are actually lining up with where they're supposed to be instead of like sticking off to the side because that would be really frustrating anyway while this is only applying to the x-axis so now obviously we need to duplicate this modifier two times or i mean if you want to do it four times you can or two but i would say what's wrong with you and then obviously change these accordingly uh oops and i'm gonna rename this this and that right there all right cool now you kind of have this uh changing arc right here and these hooks really control this and that is really added space kind of what this is except we're going to add a couple more things that will definitely add to its realism um first of which i'm going to shade this thing smooth i guess not i guess not all right whatever it's fine um what i'm going to do instead is up the subdivision surface i don't know mega look nice really all right cool so you have this really nice electric looking thingy obviously its materials aren't super electric looking but it does look it has that nice shape that we want so now what do we do we'll turn off that because that's really annoying select some bottom vertices and we're going to make one more vertex group called uh maybe you called it but i don't know if you did particle density right all right cool and then we'll assign deselect them all and then go to the particles add a new particle system and we'll call this arc children make this like 200 particles i don't know depending on how many you want if our animation is 250 frames long we'll do 250. you know we'll make this 100 frames along with 250. wow crazy all right and then the lifetime we don't want to be very high at all three at max all right we're going to click use modifier stack because if we don't then the particles are going to all spawn in at the base and stuff where we don't actually want them to spawn in so with modifier stack applied we can go to velocity no not velocity we want rotation and uh just click randomize randomize the velocity it doesn't really matter anyway um now in render we're going to go to none and yeah that's pretty much it now all we have to do is duplicate this electric thingy remove these hook modifiers uh in edit mode scale them on or scale this thing on the z down so that it's kind of small right okay and now obviously remove this particle system because we don't want this particle system on the children arcs unless you want like child of child arcs which i mean sure i'm not judging it anyway um now we want to add a particle instance modifier we're going to actually move this all the way up to the very top and one last thing that i'm going to do before i continue is scale this arc down uh even more because again it's like a little branch off of the main one so it's going to be thinner it's not going to be so thick maybe a bit bigger all right cool all right so uh oh electric tutorial i didn't realize i hadn't saved which is not a good thing and you could probably tell i've done this before because i have been interrupted multiple times anyway so we're going to copy this thing's particle system we're going to check regular and size uncheck those and turn up the amount all the way so that we have those particles showing now obviously that's that's really screwed up right because if we go into this things particle settings which i probably should have caught earlier we want to add the density vertex group right so that it's only coming from that part and obviously turn down the amount because wow that's a lot i mean i you want a lot but you know i'm not here to judge um okay now one last thing that we have to do in this thing is add some modifiers called shrink wrap modifiers and these are just going to so if we go into here we're obviously going to be adding a couple more vertex groups that's what it's called um arc bass and the reason why i'm calling them bass and end is because really it's just a way to differentiate them because they're pretty much the same thing though having a differentiation between the two is really nice so assign that one and then select this one and then assign that one and there we go we're done all right cool so then in the shrink wrap modifier we're going to obviously first of all we want one of them to be shrinking to whatever this is and then the other one we're just going to add a plane to scale it out and this thing is going to we're just going to duplicate this modifier and then have this shrink wrap there with the arc end being the thing so then all of these are going to do that and wow that looks like crap yeah that does not look great anyway um one thing that i could do to actually make this look a little bit better is scale this up in edit mode but then scale it down in this mode just so that the stuff is a little it's not like if it's reaching up there it's not you know anyway uh maybe you don't know but that's okay i don't really care if you know or not um we're gonna scale this up a bit just i don't know make it look like it's like it's there uh fly this camera around make it see stuff uh scale it up a bit more obviously save um and then in here we're gonna start working on materials so actually no we should not work on materials because now that i think about it we have a couple of things to add so first of all this is this one's going to be pretty easy we just select this thing we hit i insert location and the reason why we're doing that is because we're going to add some modifiers to its graph in the graph editor to its animation curve and uh that's just so that it looks more noisy so yeah add a noise modifier uh right now it's currently just applied to the x axis oh goodness that is that is murder on the eyes i'm going to just hide that so that you can actually kind of see what's going on there anyway obviously up the scale because when stuff is kind of arcing around it's not so crazy and wild but then we up that yeah all right cool so now it's just going to look a little bit more natural we're going to copy this modifier and then duplicate it right over to the y-axis but then add some phase so that it's different same thing with the z add some face but it's different and then we're gonna do that wow that's cool wow now one other thing because we want this to kind of this empty to um stick to the plane we're gonna add a shrink wrap modifier to the plane and then it's gonna kind of just curve around on the plane maybe actually turn up that scale a bit quite a bit just so that it's not so wildly you know anyway now other thing that we're going to do this one's going to kind of be a little bit more crazy this one definitely i guess it could be exactly the same and i don't really yeah anyway you you have to have data on the graph in order to have it work with the modifiers so you no matter what have to add a keyframe whether it be staying the same the entire time or whether you wanted animated anyway scale this up uh the other one was like 50 or something and then this was like seven or something anyway and then that should be good except we want this one to also have phase because otherwise it's going to be moving at the exact same rate as the other one so we're just going to copy this paste it over to the other modifier thingies oops [Music] copy paste okay cool and now it should kind of just maybe if we if we want to on the z-axis we should just not have a modifier just for the sake of you know anyway uh now we're going to move this one around quite a bit this one's going to get a little wild it's going to kind of just you know i mean really honestly you can do whatever you want with this um but personally i'm going to just make it go crazy you know because i'm cool like that i don't know um make sure there's variation in all these again it's pretty important actually but then this thing again on the yeah i don't know if i want that much strength but this thing because it's going to be a bit crazy i get more crazy than i really want all right cool uh now if we go back to the animation yeah look at that it looks like it looks electric and stuff and you can see this kind of arcing down touching the plane which actually really looks epic it looks so cool i like it anyway um that's pretty much it for the animation of it so we're just going to add some materials which obviously for electricity let's just select this main material we're going to call it electric and for the electricity we don't want to waste any computation power so we're just going to add straight emission shader change that to like a slightly purplish color right and then up the strength about 200 because that's really nice to have and if you really want to you can go into render view and if you're using evie which i would not recommend i don't know why i just don't really like evie that much because everything looks better in cycles unless you're going for a cartoony look anyway now we select these and we just give it the exact same material and now you have this kind of really cool looking electricity yeah i mean it does look pretty cool you can't deny that anyway yeah um so we're pretty much done with that so let's just add a new material called this floor and what i'm gonna do because this is what i used for the um example is give this thing a floor material over here no no i just wanted to select both of you not 55 like something like that there we go and then uh yeah we have a floor now the reason why i don't like doing this in ev is because you can see that this is casting a shadow and in cycles you can actually pretty easily disable that by just clicking on the not the plane give me the arc okay there you go where is it call this child visibility ray visibility uncheck shadow and then do the exact same thing for the other one uncheck shadow and then you're done and then it doesn't cast a shadow but i mean you shouldn't in the first place anyway all right now one last thing that i'm going to do is just add an hdr just uh i'm going to like really low strength like 0.1 or maybe even 0.05 but it's going to just be a regular hdr i don't know it's just going to be dim so that it looks kind of like stuff is underexposed this is my new hdri folder so i don't have anything else in it really so we just select that oh yeah that's too strong maybe something like that all right cool now the the one problem that comes with cycles is that you don't get that this little bloom effect that comes with eevee like in the look dev and everything uh so the way that we fix that is here i'm just gonna render like a two sample image really quick just so that we can do some compositing and i can like show you what compositing looks like now obviously there's a lot of which is really kind of nice wow two samples that was worse than i expected for no reason i don't think i've ever rendered a two samples that's crazy oh goodness all right we're gonna just grab this and bing bong all right cool so the the only thing that we really need to do is add a filter glare actually it's not doing anything i i prefer fog glow over the streaks but what you can do is actually like uh have kind of like a mix of both of them but oh goodness that looks crazy looks wack and maybe it's a bit too purple i think it is really um so just like right about there all right cool and then yeah that's it yeah that's really it you just have this kind of thing now what i like to do sometimes for these effects is turn up the mix all the way and then kind of just move this down add a color mix come on and then change it to add really quick so it gives the exact same effect but if you want to you can actually have more than one type of glare over here so if i were to like come over here and add streaks or something then you would have types and that looks terrible but that's not the point i'm showing you you can do both but um anyway and then you can add like depth of field and stuff if you want but that's pretty much it for the electricity it looks nice and i just figured i'd show you how to make that glow because that's kind of the part that's missing if you switch to cycles from eevee but again it's like really really easy to add in because yeah it's epic like that uh so that's pretty much it uh like the video if you enjoyed it and uh i'll see you guys next time oh yeah also maybe subscribe that'd be nice

Channel: MiniFalafel

Views: 1,368

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Id: xbSxG1ZV53g

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 16 2021