Blender Tutorial - Animate Growing Effect with Particle System

a blender maniacs this is Alex cooler Bart for blender mania 3d calm and this tutorial is gonna be really really cool and really fun we're gonna take a look at how to make an animation of something like this where there's growing vines and then Leafs coming out of the vines now you can use this technique for many different things as you can use it for this or for example if there's tentacles within spikes coming out of the tentacles or maybe a DNA strand going through the body and then there's some viruses that are going off of the DNA strand or something like this but in general I'm gonna teach you how to make something curved out like this and have something then grow out of it so here we're gonna do the vines with the Leafs growing out so let's get right to it again you can see here what we have in solid mode I'm gonna create a new file file new and let's get to it we're gonna delete the default cube and we're gonna kick it off right away by making the vine and blender to do that we're gonna hit shift a add in a cylinder alright now that we have the cylinder we're just going to create an object where we want this to emit from now in the other one I created an archway but here we're just gonna add a sphere shift a add mesh UV sphere and let's move the UV sphere out here with the UV sphere we're then gonna go to the particle settings add a new particle system and click on hair now again if you want to make the archway you could just model that and add the particle settings to the archway or whatever object you want we're gonna select advanced so that we have some other options later on to play with and then over here under render we're gonna select render ads and we're gonna change this to object and render it as the cylinder that we just created so now we have this right here which is looking marvelous not really so what we need to do and these next steps make sure that you are in edit mode otherwise it will not do the same result selecting the cylinder have to go into edit mode are x90 and rotate 90 degrees and then just hit S key to scale it down and you can see what we start to have on our sphere suite we have a bunch of little nubbies all right to make them not Nubby's let's hit s Y and scale this up on the y-axis and now we got noodles coming out of our sphere all right brilliant the next thing we want to do is hit seven to go into top view and we want to make sure that these bottom vertices right here are at the origin point because later on when we scale this to animate it along the curve we want to make sure that these vertices are on the origin otherwise it does not scale properly we're gonna hit gy and like I said bring those vertices to that point right there all right cool now what we want to do is give these a little bit more of an attitude because right now it just looks like spaghetti sticking out of the sphere with our cursors still here where our origin point is for a cylinder let's hit shift a add in a curve Bezier curve now we're gonna hit our negative 90 to rotate it negative 90 so that the curve is going that way all right cool next we're gonna select our cylinder go modifiers tab add modifier curve and select the Bezier curve brilliant now it's not doing too much because if we hit tab to go into edit mode you can see that we don't have that many vertices here to play with what we need to do is hit ctrl R and then hit 20 on the keyboard to put to increase the amount of cuts to 20 left click and then right click and now if we had tab to go into object mode boom check it out we have our our vine growing brilliant I'm now going to select the Bezier curve here from the outliner because it's a little bit hard to see and I hit tab to go into edit mode now you can see we have handles here I'm gonna select second handle at the second top handle and hit e to extrude it and just bring it out one more and this is where you kind of want to shape out how you want your your vine or tentacle or whatever you're making to look now I'm going to make it kind of like this shape right here and now we want to make it taper from very thin to fatter at the bottom here to do that select the top segment here and hit alt S which basically thickens or minimizes a segment so here we're gonna hit alt s and let's bring it down a little bit so it has a little bit more influence also gonna scale that one like that there we go all right cool okay so like this one alt s just a little bit and then this bottom right here I'm gonna hit alt s and go the opposite way and fatten it sweet then I'm gonna select this right click shade smooth all right let's see what we got in our sphere whoa we got this all right it looks pretty cool all right now to animate this how do we do that quite simple we're gonna animate this along the curve basically so with this selected if we hit the S key you could see that it's scales like that but if we hit s and Y you can see that will scale just along the y axis and look as if it's growing if we play it in Reverse how cool is that all right in order to do this what you would think you would do is scale it to zero and then scale it up however if we do that if we scale it to zero right now it's uh it doesn't work after if you try to scale it up so we're actually gonna do it in Reverse and I'll kind of explain it as we do it on frame one we're just gonna hit I and insert a scaling keyframe for it at this scale right here now let's go to frame thirty and hit s Y and 0 on your keyboard to scale it to zero the y-axis and hit I scaling so now if we play this it goes backwards all we have to do to invert this is select this vert that this keyframe right here on the timeline grab it and bring it over here and then grab this one and bring it to frame 30 and put this one to frame one so that they're now inverted and if we hit play check it out brilliant I know brilliant and let's take a look at our sphere sweet how cool is that guys super awesome now how do we make the Leafs growing from this quite simple all we have to do let's pause this we're gonna hit we're gonna hit tab to go into edit mode and now hit alt a to deselect everything we're gonna make some really simple Leafs here and you could spend more time adding more details to Leafs if you want shift a add a mesh plane and bring it out over here then we're gonna hit ctrl R add a loop cut here left click right click ctrl R left click right-click and then just bring this vertex out GX bring it out I'll left-click these vertices s Y scale them up and then shift left click these vertices e to extrude X s Y bring it down like that I bring it out a little bit and then e to extrude X and bring it out and there we have a very simple leaf cool now I'm gonna hit ctrl L to select everything linked s to scale it down and what we want to do is we want to place the leaf not along the object right here but along the curve because when we hit tab to go into object mode you will see that the leaf goes along the curve however we also have another issue and that is that the leaf is being affected by the curve modifier how do we fix that you guessed it vertex groups let's go to the data tab right here create a new vertex group and hit tab to go into edit mode with the whole leaf selected we're gonna remove it so click remove to remove it and then ctrl I to invert the selection and click assign so now this vertex group is assigned to the whole cylinder but not the leaf if we had tab to go into object mode you can see it's still affected because we need to go to the modifiers tab and select vertex group group and check it out we have a leaf and now if I hit tab to go into edit mode select a vertex on the leaf and ctrl L to select linked we just place this and rotate it maybe a little bit again place it along the curve because when you hit tab to go into object mode you could see that this goes along the curve after that let's go into edit mode shift D copy this over rotate it the other way s to scale it up scale it down a little bit maybe and bring it in like so all right cool now I'm gonna make one more shift D I'm gonna hit our X 90 and then our Z 90 so that the leaf is like that however it's facing the wrong way so I'm gonna rotate it this way and just place that right here along what the curve so let me go into wireframe so I could see where the curve is again we want to place this along the curve and there we go and I'm gonna hit s to scale it down quite a bit and bring it down alright and you could just tweak it a little bit however you want that will do for the tutorial again you could tweak it and for the original animation I showed you on the Leafs I added quite a bit more vertices and a subsurface modifier by detaching them from this adding a subsurface modifier and then rejoining it with this mesh but anyways I'll let you do that on your own adding more detail to Leafs now how do we animate these Leafs going out quite simple now you want to make sure that you are done with the Leafs and that you have all the Leafs or whatever you're adding added and then we're gonna go to the data tab again and we're gonna go to shape keys click the plus icon on shape key and the basis shape key here is going to be the basis or the original look of the mesh which is going to be like this we're then going to add another shape key and this one is going to be the one that changes the mesh right here we're gonna put the value all the way to one and now if we hit tab to go into edit mode this is where the magic happens we're gonna change this to the 3d cursor and if we had tap two to go into edge select mode what we want to do I'm gonna go into wireframe we want to select the two edges two edges right here of the leaf so the two edges like that of the leaf and then hit ctrl or before you hit control the two edges hit shift s cursor to select it so that the cursor is there then hit control L to select linked and now you'll see if we scale this down it scales down the leaf like that so and again it's scaling along the cursor if we hit S and then zero theoretically it scales it to zero and basically disappears how cool is that so now we just got to do that with the other Leafs select the two edges shift desk cursor to selected ctrl L to select the whole leaf s0 to scale it down to zero and then do that with your other leaf right here select the two whoa not that edges shift s cursors is selected control L s0 and boom and now check it out if we go to object mode go back to solid view watch if we the value at one the Leafs are gone value at zero the Leafs appear how cool is that very cool so now all we have to do is animate this value let's go to like frame 26 when it's almost fully grown out we're gonna put the value 1 we're gonna hit eye with the mouse hovered over it to insert a keyframe and then however long you want the Leafs to take to grow out I'm gonna go to frame 45 bring it to 0 and hit the I key to insert a keyframe like that and check it out if we play this lame put the end frame to frame 60 or so shift left arrow and hit the spacebar to play it check it out now these are very uniform so I'm gonna select a sphere good particle tab and I'm gonna select rotation right here and increase the phase and the random phase to rep to rotate them randomly and then lastly I'm gonna go to the scale rent scale randomness to make some shorter and some longer like that maybe not that extreme you could also increase the scale right here and make it really big like that and make something really really crazy but that's basically it that is how you make a vine grow and then Leafs grow out of it again you can use this for many many different things how cool does that look actually the sphere looks even cooler than the archway now quickly how to texture this or add materials to it let's select the vine hits spacebar to stop the animation if we go and add a new material here you can see we could add a new material make it greenish and a dark green let's go to the material tab and now it's add materials to Leafs if we hit tab to go into edit mode you can see that we cannot see the Leafs any longer what you need to do is go to the vertex data tab and make sure that you're on the basis key right here so that you're able to see the Leafs and then just go ahead and select one of each of the edges of the Leafs ctrl L to select linked the material tab click the plus icon new click assign and then make this whatever color you want in this case I'm gonna make them red why not and there we go all right Red's a little weird I'm gonna make them light green again there we go and that is how you do it again I cannot wait to see what you make with this please expand on the tutorial make something different from the techniques that you learn here or make the same thing whatever you want share it on blender mania 3.com on the forums cannot wait to see what you make and I will see you in the next tutorial ciao for now avoir

Channel: BlenderMania

Views: 6,746

Keywords: blender, growing, effect, vine, plant

Id: WfWhhC7WbMo

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 05 2020