Blender Tutorial - How to Animate Butterflies using Particles & Curve

[Music] hey blender maniacs this is Alex quarter bar for blender mania 3com and in this video we're gonna see how to animate butterflies along a path like you see here now you could animate butterflies bees bats dragons heck flying cars if you want but this is a really cool effect as you can see they follow along a path and you could use this for many many different things and then we got this thing over here which is butterfly 1.0 anyways we're gonna be seeing how to create this effect which is gonna be a lot of fun first thing we need to do is in a new blender scene we need to delete the default cube and then head on over to textures comm and search for butterfly I'm going to be using this butterfly image right here but you can use whatever you want back in blender and top view shift a add an image reference and go ahead and load in that butterfly image now I'm gonna select it our rotate it 180 degrees and then shift a add a cylinder rotate that and then scale it down sy2 scale it up and basically fit it onto the main body of the butterfly in edit mode select a face e to extrude s to scale so that it's a little bit more like a butterfly then scale it down and fit it better in edit mode I'm going to add a plane scale that down and basically just selecting the vertices and G to grab them e to extrude I'm gonna so I'm gonna position the vertices and extrude out some more vertices and basically just follow along the wings now I'm gonna select one vertex ctrl L shift D grab it over and then sx- one to flip it to the other side so boom we have duplicate wings and then just adjust it so that it fits around the image a little bit better and doesn't go into the white area and then just adjust it however you need to adjust it so that goes along the image and add in some loop cuts with ctrl R if need be go ahead and delete the reference image select your object and go to the material tab add a new material and change it from base color to image texture go ahead and load in that butterfly texture all right now split the viewport and change it to the UV image editor in edit mode you ejected from view and in the UV editor we're gonna hit the a key to select everything our 180 and then make sure your material mode obviously so you could see it and scale it up so it fits your image sweet look at that we got a really blocky butterfly next we're gonna hit shift a add in an armature make sure that your origin point is in the middle of the butterfly and rotate it on the x-axis 90 degrees so that it's along the body then in edit mode shift D copy the bone and then our 90 and rotate it and place it right there then hit shift D s X negative one two flip it to the other side as well in object mode we're gonna go ahead and select the butterfly shift select the bone ctrl P with empty groups then selecting the butterfly going to the group tab we're gonna go into edit mode select one vertex control l and then assign it to bone zero zero to assign the other the other vertices to bone zero zero one and the main vertices to bone one so now you should have the vertices assigned to those selected bones so that when you rotate the wings it rotates those vertices then going into the graph editor on frame 1 we're gonna rotate the wings in pose mode by hitting ctrl P our control tab sorry we're gonna insert a rotation keyframe right there on frame 1 then on frame 10 rotate the wings down and insert a rotation keyframe right there and then go to frame 20 and copy the first frame from frame 1 on to frame 20 so now you should have something like that now we're gonna go and select a bone and make sure to go to one of the axes that has the align like that hit the end key and go to the modifiers tab and we're gonna add a cycles modifier so now it will cycle that animation continuously we're gonna click the copy link and then on the other bone go ahead and find the correct bone and paste it on to that correct axis and you can see that now it cycles the animation how awesome is that now in the in the timeline I'm just gonna scale down the keyframes so that it goes a little bit faster and then what we want to do is go ahead and merge the windows and go back into object mode move the butterfly out of the way add a cube and add in a curve and in edit mode tab I'm just gonna extrude the curve with the e key and make a curve like that now go to the particle system I'm gonna go to the render tab and render it as an object and cylinder and you can see that now we got a bunch of butterflies flying out of the cube on the curve we're gonna go the physics tab out of forcefield physics and you can see that if we play it it doesn't do much so let's go to the particle system and under under the field weights we're gonna turn off gravity and that way now we no longer have gravity and boom look at that we got butterflies everywhere under the force field let's change it to curve and you can see it still does nothing but under the force field we're gonna change the strength to negative 5 and now with the strength of negative 5 you could see it follows along also change the lifetime of your particles to 200 so that they don't die on you we don't want butterflies to be dying that would be sad and now you can see the particles follow along the curve how cool is that I'm just gonna extend this out a little bit and now you can see that the butterflies are a little bit all over the place so to change that what we could do is select the curve and with the curve there's an option on it that's called flow and so if we go over here to the flow and change that to 0.5 you can see if we increase this amount they're closer to the curve and more congested for example if we change this to a higher amount you can see that now it's ridiculous and they're in traffic or something so let's change this back to 0.5 and now we're gonna select the butterfly and we want different colors so split the viewport go to the shader editor and right here we're gonna search for pressing the spacebar key we're gonna search for the object info node go ahead and add that and then we're gonna hit shift a go to color and we're gonna add in a hue/saturation node and this hue/saturation we could change the colors of our butterfly however we want it to be random so it's taking the random factor of the object info we're gonna put that into the factor there and boom it gives us random colors house is that now you could also put this object info node into the hue it gives you much brighter colors which isn't as real looking so I'm just gonna leave it into the factor and by changing the hue you could change the color of your butterflies and now you can see the butterflies are facing the wrong way they're flying upside down which is not good so go to the particle settings let's go ahead and go to rotation enable rotation and we're gonna change it to object Z and with object Z restarting it at frame one you will see that now our butterflies are flying the right way sweet now we want to add a little bit of variation to this so before that I'm gonna turn the roughness up and the specular down on the butterfly so that's not so shiny now like I said we want variation to this so selecting the bone and shift selecting the butterfly we're gonna hit shift D copy it over and on this new butterfly we're gonna make the animation of the wings a little bit faster so selecting the first bone we're gonna go to frame 1 and then select all the bones with the a key and s to scale it down and this will scale down the time of your wings so you can see it goes a lot faster now we need to do the same thing with the other wing make sure your key frame is on frame 1 for it to scale along that keyframe and then just scale it down so that it matches the other wing as you can see right now we got one wing faster than the other so make sure that they're the same speed otherwise you're gonna have some crazy butterflies and now we're gonna put these in a collection ctrl G and then under the particle settings we're gonna change it to collection and make the collection the butterfly collection that we just created a boom look at that we got a swarm of butterflies sweet now here we could increase the scale under the particle settings and the random scale as well to have different size butterflies and look at that it's the invasion of butterfly madness suite so with that make sure to subscribe to this channel I have almost daily uploads check out blender mania 3.com to join the community I'll see you in the next video ciao for now

Channel: BlenderMania

Views: 20,507

Keywords: blender, 2.8, tutorial, how to, particles, curve, physics

Id: dhV_T_UTXt8

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 02 2020