Blender Tutorial - Cyberpunk Animation in Eevee

hi everyone today i will show you how to create a retro cyberpunk animation loop even if you're a blender beginner we'll build our scenes starting from the absolute basics and i'll do my best to explain the entire process step by step by the end of this video you should be able to create your own stylized animation loops they look really great when played in the background during the long winter evenings which let's be honest most of us will be spending playing cyberpunk 2077 this video is a little bit longer to what i usually post on the channel so please forgive my deadpan humor that simply kicks in sometimes when i'm a little bit tired remember you can download 3d files for this project completely for free link is in the video description and in case there is anything unclear in my techniques feel free to leave your questions in the comments section so now without further ado let's just jump into it [Music] we will start by creating the basic grid and camera animation so i'm going to press shift a to add a plane and the camera the camera has the rotation applied so i'm going to press alt r to reset and now number three on my numpad to switch to the side view you can also do it using this tool here and by pressing the letters um as you can see i've rotated the camera by 90 degrees i do that by pressing r and holding the ctrl key so we have incremental rotation and from the top view which is number seven on the numpad i will now move the camera backwards actually i'm gonna move it as you can see we have grid here so i'm gonna move it to this location just one small grid from this bigger grid layout we need to keep an eye on those things when you do the looped animations now i'm going to scale up the plane by 10 times so i've pressed the s key now i'm going to type 10 and approve by enter i will press shift d and then y to move this plane up and hold ctrl to snap to the grid now i'm going to press z switch to the wireframe view select the camera and to have a loop animation we will have to move it to kind of exactly the same position in relation to this plane so you can see it's just one little grid from this edge and i'm gonna move the camera to one little grid from this edge before we create camera motion let's set up the animation so let's hit this icon here and change the frame rate to 30 fps you can go with 60 if you want this super battery smooth animation but just for the standard use let's use 30. now here under the output settings let's switch png to ffmpg and under the encoding settings you have to switch the container to mpeg4 and the quality can be per shutter perceptually looseless yes okay with those things set up let's now um think of the animation length so with 30 fps and let's say 5 second animation we need 150 frames so i'm going to move the camera back to the original point now i'm going to press i key and choose the location so this way we've created the first keyframe by left clicking and dragging i'm gonna move to the last frame move the camera to the position i want it to have and now i'm going to press i again and create another keyframe so as you can see when i move the timeline the camera has its motion however you can see this acceleration happening here and the acceleration at the end so this is something i want to avoid to fix that let's enlarge this area switch to the graph editor and with my camera selected you can see the motion is also displayed as those graphs let's tap a key here then v and switch the graphs to the vector lines and right now you can see we have this very nice and continuous motion let's now switch to the camera view and start working on the grid i can do that by pressing the numpad 0 or i can just click this icon here in case you don't have the numpad zero so when i move the timeline you can see we have the animation happening here when i press the spacebar we get a real time preview and by looking at this viewport grid you can see we have a nice looped motion except of this plane popping up here so i'm gonna delete it right now i was using it just to get a better preview on the camera motion when i was setting up the animation so i'm gonna delete it and now switch back to the camera with my plane selected i'm going to press the tab key and now when it's highlighted in orange that means everything inside of the plane all the geometry parts are selected i'm going to right click and choose the subdivide option so i'm going to subdivide this plane a few times so we have a nice looking grid um i'm just thinking if it's enough maybe let's ctrl z and stick to something like this for now to make the grid visible in the viewport because when i press the z key and switch to the solid or rendered views you can see we still have the plane with my plane object selected i'm going to go to the modifiers and choose the wireframe modifier so by adding it you can see the newly created grid in the edit mode becomes this kind of lattice so to edit the thickness of the grid elements i can just use this field here i would say this value should work fine at least for now let's create also a very basic shader just so we know what's happening so it's not all gray as you can see i'm switching to the shader editor here from the graph editor i'm going to press n to have this bar disappear and now by clicking this icon here with my plane selected i'm able to add a material so you can see material is added in this window but the best way to edit it is using the shader editor in my opinion of course so let's delete this principle bsdf by left clicking and hitting x key i'm going to press shift a choose shader and pick up the emission shader let's connect it with the material output and you can see the grid is now visible i'm gonna click this icon here disable the environment lightning go to the render settings and enable the bloom effect so once i do this you don't see much happening but if i increase the light emission strength you can see now we get this very cool glow effect which will add a lot to our final animation since our camera is already animated all we have to do right now to have the very basic animation is simply replicating the grid around the 3d scene so the easiest way to do that is just selecting our plane object and adding a few more modifiers i'm gonna shrink the wireframe modifier and add the first array modifier as you can see the array modifier creates new copies of our main object depending on the value i type in here and also we can change the position of all the new copies so first i want them to be distributed along the y-axis that's why i only have the value of one here and let's maybe create seven or eight copies now i'm gonna add another array modifier and you can see it adds the entire new duplication of this modified object so let's add three rows to the right and i'm gonna add one more array modifier but type minus one here so it creates the whole duplicate of this object but to the left let's press nump at zero and deselect everything to see the effect if we get too much glow as you can see right now we can simply reduce the emission strength and maybe let's fine-tune the wireframe thickness a little bit so i'm going to decrease it to 0.002 i think it looks interesting you might have this kind of flickering appearing in some of the animation examples so by fine-tuning those settings you will probably be able to make it disappear it really depends on your scene setup on the final resolution of your animation so it's a little bit of trial and error but yeah i'm pretty sure you're gonna make it work just fine as you can see with this many copies i think the animation loop looks correct let's maybe change the color to something more interesting like this and let's maybe edit the camera a little bit so we could rotate the camera to have more of this grid visible in the frame as you can see right now half of the frame will be just black with a little bit of color but you can also use this shift y option when you select the camera settings here within the lens and just decrease this value you can see the camera viewport position moves downwards what we've created so far could be already saved as a very simple animation to do that just go to the render here and choose the render animation it will be saved under the output path you specify here normally on windows it's the c drive and the tmp folder inside now you can still fine tune the rendering before you run the animation a little bit so i normally increase the samples to 100 enable the motion blur not always but for this it should be fine and then i increase the shutter speed to one i also play around a little bit with the filter size so sometimes when i have a lot of flickering happening i increase it to three it sometimes it helps sometimes it doesn't so you have to you know play around with it and just yeah render your animation see how it looks like and let's continue with the project let's now add some first details i'm going to select the grid enter the edit mode right click and subdivide it once so we have more detail to work with i'm going to exit the camera view and duplicate the grid when it's selected so it's a shift d shortcut you can see i have the copy attached to my mouse i'm gonna cancel it by hitting uh escape button but the copy is still there so what i want to have a new material on this new grid when i go to the material tab here you can see there is number two here and that means this material the orange one is assigned to two meshes in our scene so i want to have an independent material and to do it i just click this number you can see the name changed and now when i change the color to blue and move the plane we still have the orange below and the blue on top so i'm going to enter the edit mode and i want to start moving the individual vertices to create some hills when i select one of them and press g you can see this thing is happening but i want to this effect to be a little bit more smooth so to activate proportional editing tool that allows us doing this we can just click this icon here or hit the o key on your keyboard and when you now press the g key you can see the circle appearing and when you scroll up and down with your mouse you're increasing the radius of the transformation so i'm just gonna click on those vertices one by one and just create some very random hills however you have to be careful around the edges because when i move it too much you can see there is this hole appearing and it's going to be visible in every single copy created by the array modifier let me show it here as well maybe like this yeah you can see the holes on the right so to prevent this from happening we simply need to hide those first rows of vertices in our plane to do that you just hold your shift and alt keys and left click i will switch to the wireframe view so it's more visible again here shift alt left click shift alt left click and here with all those rows selected i'm going to press h key to hide them z to come back to the rendered view and we can now easily easily modify the rest of the object i've created something like this so far but i'm not fully happy with how it looks like from the camera so i'm gonna select it and actually type zero here and go back to the default value we can still edit it later so i can clearly see some of the hills could be a little bit higher and i'm gonna improve it right now let's select this random vertex here move it up just like this you can actually move it left and right as well but let's maybe stick to the z-axis and i will maybe add some details like this here just to give some extra detail to this main path that we have like this and now to bring more randomness and some craziness we can switch the algorithm or i don't know interpolation used here to random and right now when i left click on any of the vertices and press g increase the selection radius you can see that randomly moves the neighboring points up and down so this can actually add a lot of cool look to our hills after just a minute of clicking here and there you can see now our scene looks more interesting however it's a little bit too messy so let's clean this up i'm gonna select our hills object enter the edit mode and i want to delete all those planes that are here but before i do that i will turn everything to triangles i'm hitting the a key oh and by the way i need to press alt h to unhide the hidden vertices now i'm deselecting by pressing alt a and selecting by pressing a and now ctrl t to turn everything into triangles i'm going to switch to the side view by pressing 1 on my numpad then switch to the wireframe view for a better preview of the geometry b for box selection and i'm just gonna freely select those vertices i want them to be leveled with the ground plane and my 3d cursor gonna help me with that since it's already in position so i'm going to press the dot key on my keyboard and choose the orientation point to be at 3d cursor when i turn the gizmo on you can see it's exactly at the 3d cursor now i'm going to press s to scale o to turn sorry i need to turn off the proportional editing first so now i'm going to press scale by s by hitting s z to scale only within the z-axis and when i press 0 now and i prove by enter you can see everything is leveled to the same position so with all the vertices selected i'm going to now press 3 number 3 on the regular keyboard which switches me to the face mode here so you can see it's vertex edge and face and i need to delete those faces so i'm just going to press the x key and choose delete faces option it looks much better already but i want to remove this transparency effect from our hills so to do that we need to go back to the edit mode again i'm pressing the tab key and you can see we actually have the hills as they should look like but in the object mode we have the wireframe and that means we need to modify this modifier a little bit so i'm gonna go back to the edit mode and before we start working i still want to convert those triangles back to the quads so i select everything by pressing the a key and then alt j so blender kind of automatically converts triangles to quads for me i do this because i think it looks better with the wireframe modifier in the a and it's less messy but yeah um first thing you want to do is add the new material slot by pressing the plus button here and this is the material slot but it doesn't have any material yet we can create it later however we can already assign geometry to a certain material slots what do i mean by that when i have the slot selected that gray bar indicates it when i press the button nothing happens because everything is assigned to this material slot so i'm gonna now press shift d to duplicate this geometry then escape to cancel the transformation but the geometry is still there and this newly copied geometry will be assigned to this material slot once i do this you can see everything turns black but there is no reason to panic what we have to do right now is to create a vertex group and a vertex vertex group is basically something like this you can select any number of vertices assign them to the group and if you want to have this selection back again later you can just press select what we want is everything with this blue shader so i can select it to be in one of the groups so now with this vertices with the blue shader selected i assign them to the group now i'm gonna exit the edit mode deselect everything go to the wireframe modifier and here you can see we can tell blender to assign this modifier only to a certain vertex group so let's choose our group but still there is no transparency right and that's because the modifier deletes the original mesh and if we unswitch this then boom voila we have exactly what i was talking about so this simple scene already could be material for another animation all you have to do i think it's just adding a few more of the array copies in front and it's very easily doable we just access the array modifier increase the number to let's say 15 then we have to do it for the original grid we switch back to the camera view and with the render settings from the previous animation all you have to do right now is just hit render here i mean render animation of course before we continue i need to mention one important thing just when you're editing the mountains i forgot to mention that you always need to keep at least few vertices here on those lines from the original plane before we subdivided it because otherwise the array modifier won't follow our grid alignment that we have for the camera loop so for example if i delete only those vertices here you can see the whole thing shifts and this will destroy the animation loop so just bear that in mind when you're working on those mountains what i really love about working with ev it's obviously the real time preview but it's really something great that you can fine tune everything and see the end result so let's now edit the look of our animation a little bit so it's more cyberpunk kind of theme of colors i don't know what that means to be honest but yeah let's keep it as it is and i think i'm gonna reduce the grid density i mean the grid thickness to something like this yeah now it looks much better same for the mountains but maybe i will keep it a little bit thicker like that or maybe not actually let's keep it like this so you can see the glow effect got also a little a little bit more softer but we can always bring it back by increasing the emissions strength i'm not saying this is the result i want right now but just to let you know i suggest we now add a sun what do you think um i mean you can disagree but it's me who's recording the video so i'm pressing shift a and adding a circle i'm gonna press numpad comma to zoom in on my newly created object or in general on the selection i'm pressing s to scale it up moving upwards a little bit and tab to enter the edit mode so you can see i have all the vertices selected however my gizmo is at the 3d cursor and i don't want this to be like that so i'm going to press the dot key on the keyboard choose the bounding box so the transformation moves where it should be now i'm going to press the e key to extrude and escape to cancel but the newly created vertices are there i can just press g always to check what i want to do right now is scaling everything to the inside and finally merging in one point so we can do this by pressing the m key for merge and just choosing at center and now we have a perfect i mean perfect circle i'm going to press the r key and then x to rotate it and hold ctrl for more controlled rotation anyway let's now move it to the horizon press 0 on the numpad and see the position of our sun i guess yeah i guess it looks okay our sun needs to shine so let's press z and choose the rendered view and we have a black hole and that's because there is no shader so i'm clicking this icon new here deleting the principle vsdf shift a within the shader editor and choosing the emission shader and now we have a sun so let's increase it to 1000 that's way too much to 10 that's okay still it's totally white and by the way i think it should be a moon so how we can add this cool color transition to an object like that let's select the emission shader press shift d to duplicate it then shift a again and let's add a mix shader yes we're gonna mix those two colors which are white so we have white so let's switch it to something like that so still nothing really changes however we can also add a texture here so i'm pressing shift a choosing the texture of course and looking for the gradient texture something like that and i can connect this gray dot with this gray dot and you can see we have some kind of gradient let me add one more node which is called uh the color ramp and it's under the converter and this now allows me to kind of control this gradient so when i move this black point to the right this white point to the left you can see now something really happens so we need to somehow rotate this gradient well it's easy of course i'm just increasing this window here i'm going to press shift a choose the input and the texture coordinate with a lot of outputs and in general just plug it in the generated nothing happens but we can now add the vector mapping node of course it's it's obvious right everyone knows it and here we can rotate things so since everything happens within the y-axis if i rotate it it should rotate but it doesn't but come on it's easy you rotate it within the z-axis and then the whole thing disappears but you can try moving it as well so maybe if we just rotate it and move it and rotate it and then you know okay i need to type 90 here and one here and then it works easy let's go to the color ramp note and switch the interpolation from linear to b spline and now we have a perfect sun or maybe it should be a moon because it's a night anyway i think if we change this white color to something more interesting like blue maybe this will add more to the scene same with this reddish color i think red was actually pretty cool maybe not maybe yes and maybe blue it's up to you guys um i'm just gonna stick to something like this so when i now play the animation you can see we have a problem and that's the sun which jumps back and forth to its original location i mean it always stays at the same location it's the camera that moves so we need to keep the same distance between the camera and the sun and we do that by setting up the children and parent relations in blender that's something you normally do at the shrinks office but hey we can also do it in blender you just have to hold the shift key and select two objects however camera has to be an active object so i'm gonna hold shift and left click it again so it's brighter orange color and now i press ctrl p key to set the parent children relations it's still better than slave and master relations as it was previously in some of the softwares anyway let's not dive too deep into this when we set the relation between the parent and the child in blender that means it will always keep the same distance from the parent so sounds very sad but it fixes the problem we had with the sun the static sun animation looks a little bit boring so let's fix it by adding a few keyframes by the way you can switch to the beginning and end of your time frame by holding the shift key and then pressing the left or right arrows so i'm going to create the first keyframe with my sun selected here and then exactly the same keyframe here so you can see the sun stays in the same place and this orange bar indicates that in the middle of my animation i'm gonna move the sun a little bit down and create another keyframe so you can see this nice smooth motion which wasn't desired for the camera in my opinion looks pretty pretty cool with the sun let's now move to quickly building a city from a single plane i'm going to press shift a add a plane scale it up by 10 times yeah just as with the main grids i'm gonna press numpad coma to zoom in and i'm gonna enter the edit mode so now within the edit mode i'm gonna scale the plane within the x-axis i'm gonna press ctrl r and scroll up with my mouse to add some new edge loops approve with enter select everything and subdivide yeah this many times i'm gonna now switch to the face mode deselect everything by pressing alt a and choose the select random option here so you can see we have some of the random faces selected i'm going to press the e key to extrude them up now i'm going to press 1 to switch to the vertices and i'm going to press shift h to hide everything except of my selection now i'm going to switch to faces again deselect select random and extrude again and you can guess i'm gonna repeat the process so i'm gonna switch to vertices shift h switch to faces deselect select random extrude don't bother about the sun right now switch to vertices one eternity later and i'm back with my cd ready to be shown to the world so let's enter the edit mode one more time select everything and let's subdivide it one two yeah two times that's enough so i'm gonna apply the wireframe modifier as on any other object decrease the thickness a little bit and go back to the rendered view so yeah now our cd looks nice it's a little bit too high obviously but let's apply the shader and see how it looks like instead of deleting and connecting the emission shader here i can switch it here as well so you now you know multiple ways to do this so i'm just scaling the city within the z-axis if it's too big and putting the x-axis if i want it to spread over the horizon so let's increase the shader strength to 50 and let's now choose some nice cyberpunk retro wave synth wave wherever you're listening to color the current progress could be saved as another animation i think the third one while we're creating this project which is not bad of course and before we jump to the final details i just want to talk about the fewer minor tweaks that i've applied so the first one as you can see the towers are not transparent any longer same happens to the ground plane and i did this exactly the same way i as i did with the mountains another thing originally the towers were flickering a little bit too much so i've increased the wireframe thickness and when i played with the animation you couldn't see the city is moving back and forth a little bit so i did this exactly the same way as i animated the sun except the sun moves in the z-axis and the city moves in the y-axis now when you look at the city's position here and in the last frame it it's not exactly the same position because the camera parent generates this y motion but when you create the keyframes when you add a keyframe here and when you move to the last frame and simply just press i and create location keyframe you'll have this orange bar indicating that the position is exactly the same for this object so don't worry about this parent generated motion just create a new keyframe somewhere here with an added distance and this keyframe animation will be added to the motion generated by the camera and you will have this nice kind of perspective distortion effect so now we'll add minor geometry details and i'm going to use the choco for model manager for that these details will be the choco fruit chickens and if you want to learn more on how i'm using this and then how to get access to all of those models uh just follow the link in the video description which links to the addons website and the whole video series so i've just added two chickens i will put one on the left of the scene and one on the right by default those models have more realistic shaders so we will have to remove all of them and create something new for our scene so i'm gonna just hit new here add the new emission shader but i'm gonna add the mix shader and i'm gonna use the wireframe node so i'm connecting those two gray dots and you can see we have this interesting effect so i'm gonna put this node down here i'm gonna change this color to something interesting increase the strength slightly maybe too much and with the settings here i'm able to modify the wireframes thickness as well so as you can see this is another way we can create the wireframe effect the difference is it divides the entire model's geometry to triangles so you won't be able to have those rectangular shapes with this shader way of creating it now i will also apply the decimate modifier this one to the geometry which reduces its the amount of faces so we can create something more uh corresponding to the look of our scene our chickens are now ready to be copied around the scene using the array modifier however as with everything in life there is another problem when i simply add the array modifier you can see the new copy of the chicken is created next to it so this will destroy our animation loop but as in life there is a hack for that so i'm going to select both chickens then press shift h to hide everything except of them i'm going to add a new plane and scale it up 10 times enter the edit mode subdivide it and select the newly created vertices and delete them so now when i press the a key you can see we have those four vertices on the corners of the plane i leave the edit mode select one of the chickens select the plane and press ctrl j so the chicken will be merged with this previously existing plane object when i do it you can see we've lost the decimate modifier but that's not a problem at all because now i can hold the shift select this key kitchen chicken press ctrl c and just copy the modifiers so you can see we got our look back and the chicken is now part of the plane so if i add the array modifier you can see it follows the exact grid pattern as we have with the rest of the objects so i'm going to press one here press yeah press i'm gonna type one here zero here and distribute the chickens forward so i will left click on this chicken hold shift select this one and now press ctrl j again so the red chicken will be joined with the green one and boom it's also distributed with the array modifier and i'm just gonna fine tune the decimate modifier so we get more cyberpunk look we could actually animate it as well if you want to you can just add keyframes to the decimate modifier and it will change the look of our details but let's just keep it as it is for now i'm pretty happy with this look i'm going to press alt h to unhide everything and press spacebar just to see how it looks like we're getting close to the end of this project so it's time for the final touches and the first one will be adding the reflections to our ground plane so i'm gonna select it and go to the material settings and here we still have an empty material slot so i'm gonna hit the new button here to add the new material and the principal bsdf shader i'm gonna keep it this time let's not kill it but let's increase the metallic value to one and roughness to zero so theoretically we should have the mirror reflections visible right now and to get them visible we have to go to the render settings and turn on the screen space reflections wow now it looks much better however i think the mirror reflection is something i don't like in our scene so let's just increase the roughness and if we go too much yeah it all becomes very blurry so what works fine for me usually it's 0.15 value and we can run the test render just to double check if it's all nice and speaking of colors i'm actually quite happy with what we've achieved so far i will maybe adjust the city color to something more violet and increase the strength so we get more of this nice glow i will also increase the energy of our grid here and maybe move it towards blue a little bit more just like that this color i will maybe push it a little bit more towards blue as well and i would say that's that's actually it maybe the sun yeah maybe let's work a little bit on this gradient so we get this bluish color reflected here and visible on the sun itself however if we move this gradient too close you can see there is this ugly border visible so let's not overdo it and let's try to keep it somewhere around those values when you adjust the sun color it also influences the scene look quite significantly so you might play around with it and as you can see we're very quickly able to change the complete mood of the picture so feel totally free and do whatever suits your style here i'm just going to stick with blue in the end probably so yeah i also want to add a bit of punch to the final image because right now when you look at it it's a little bit hazy because of the glow effect everywhere so within the render settings when you go to the color management the easiest way to increase the contrast is using the gamma slider if we go down with it you can see now we get those very dark areas but i will just go down by 40 so i'm typing 0.6 here and this already looks nice but if i increase the exposure by one now i think it really gets this very nice saturation and color look which fits the cyber punk retro style let's call it like that we can also increase the contrast using the looks but it works a little bit different and i don't like overdoing it so let's use medium high contrast here and yeah i think that's really what i wanted to achieve so we're getting to the end of the video and i really want to thank everyone for sticking with me i really hope you've learned something new today and i strongly encourage you to experiment and create your own animation loops feel free to share them with the choco for hashtag on the social media so i can see them and give you a shout out if you have any questions please leave them in the comments section under the video and if you'd like to support my channel visit the choco for store and get some of our professional 3d assets for blender you may check out our starter pack which includes over 150 best-selling choco 4 models which will allow you to quickly create any basic 3d scene in blender if you want to get more serious feel free to check my interior visualization course and learn why understanding the visualization workflow is one of the best skills you could learn as a 3d artist that's gonna be it for today thanks again everyone for watching and see you in another choco for video

Channel: chocofur

Views: 10,858

Keywords: blender, blender 3d, b3d, cybeprunk, animation loop, animation, eevee, beginner, chocofur, retrowave, blender tutorial, blender 2.90, blender3d, blender beginner tutorial, blender beginner, vfx, 3d, asset management, blender guru, cyberpunk 2077, synthwave, loop animation, loop animation blender, blender 2.8, blender eevee, blender abstract tutorial, blender easy tutorial, intro to blender, 2.8, tutorial, blender today, blender abstract, eevee animation

Id: 5qN2CfVjwRg

Length: 44min 50sec (2690 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020